Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

Poetry Month 2024: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

Is it a fable?—or a mere fairy story—or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love—or what is it?

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” first published in 1862 in Rossetti’s own Goblin Market and Other Poems. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Lizzie and Laura are sisters on the brink of womanhood, who often frequent the rushy brookside near their home. Often, too, they see goblin men tramping down the glen with baskets and dishes overloaded with every succulent fruit that field and forest can provide. Both sisters know better than to deal with or even look at such folk. One evening, when prudent Lizzie has run home, curious Laura stays behind. The goblins offer her their fruit, and accept one of her golden curls as payment. Laura sucks down the irresistible juices of the “globes fair or red” until her lips are sore, then wanders dazedly home.

Lizzie upbraids Laura for staying behind in the twilight, a dangerous hour for maidens. She recounts the story of Jeanie, who had commerce with the goblins only to waste away and die when she could no longer find them and their wares. Laura rejects her sister’s warnings. She’ll seek the goblins again and bring Lizzie back some of their fruit. The two go to their shared bed and sleep peacefully, “cheek to cheek and breast to breast.”

The next day the sisters go about their usual chores and innocent amusements, but Laura drifts “in an absent dream…sick in part.” By the brook in the evening, Lizzie hears the goblins’ customary cry of “Come buy” while Laura hears nothing. That night she lies awake “in a passionate longing”, filled with “baulked desire.” Nor do her daily and nightly watches bring the goblin men back to her. Her one memento of that delirious evening is a kernel-stone from a goblin peach. She tries planting it, but it never sprouts.

Laura sinks into decline, neglecting her chores, eating little. Lizzie, who still hears the goblins, longs to buy their fruit for Laura but fears the exchange will cost her too dear. At last, however, with Laura dwindling toward death, Lizzie waits by the brook in the twilight. When the goblins come, she offers them a silver penny for an apronful of fruit. The goblins insist she must feast on her purchase alongside them. When Lizzie refuses to stay, they attack her and try to force fruit into her mouth. Heroically virginal, she resists their efforts. At last the goblins angrily depart, leaving Lizzie to run home with her face and neck dripping with crushed fruit, “goblin pulp and goblin dew.” “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices,” she beseeches Laura—for Laura’s sake, she has “had to do with goblin merchant men.”

Laura’s appalled that Lizzie will now share her fate, but she can’t resist kissing and kissing her “with a hungry mouth.” Once so luscious, the goblin fruit now scorches her lips and tastes like wormwood. In a burning frenzy, she “gorges on bitterness” until she swoons. Will she die or live? Lizzie watches over her sister until morning, when Laura wakes with her vitality restored.

Years later, when both sisters are wives and mothers, Laura tells her children about her encounter with the goblins and how Lizzie won for her “the fiery antidote” to their poisonous fruit. There is no friend like a sister, is the lesson, and so she bids them to “cling together” as she and Lizzie have done.

What’s Cyclopean: There are pellucid grapes with sugar-sweet sap. The goblins themselves have all manner of animal features, but the most fascinating and out-landish may the wombat-goblin, “obtuse and furry”.

Weirdbuilding: Fairy markets are a common trope—places where all manner of fascinating and dangerous goods may be found for fascinating and dangerous prices. A couple such markets show up in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series: In An Absent Dream draws its title from this week’s poem.

Anne’s Commentary

Welcome to April and Poetry Month! My own first encounter with “Goblin Market” was in an undergraduate course on Victorian literature. I don’t think anyone in the class failed to pick up on the poem’s sexual overtones, but only a couple of students ventured to bring it up. Our instructor was quintessentially a PROFESSOR, tweed-clad and gray-haired and given to bow ties, no less. We didn’t want to come off like a bunch of horny sophomores or to offend someone of his staid demeanor. Midway through the session, we learned a lesson with ramifications far beyond nineteenth-century poetry: Don’t judge a person by their sartorial choices and typically dry address.

This professor had a subscription to Playboy. Or at least he had a copy of the 1973 issue that featured “Goblin Market” in its Ribald Classics column. Playboy credits Jonathan Cott, editor of the 1973 anthology Beyond the Looking Glass, for at last recognizing “the lurid sexual fantasies that raged in Miss Rossetti’s unconscious.” Cott described “Goblin Market” as “the most extreme depiction of repressed eroticism in children’s literature.” Apparently thinking its readership needed less high-flown language, Playboy translated Cott’s statement to “[Goblin Market is] the all-time hard-core pornographic classic for tiny tots.” The poem has had many illustrators over the years, including Christina’s brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Rackham, and Lawrence Housman. None of their illustrations were up to Playboy standards, so the magazine printed several by Kinuko Y. Craft. Our professor kindly let us have a look at Craft’s gorgeous but very much not-safe-for-work interpretations of “Goblin Market.” All kinds of trigger warnings could apply, including attempted rape, consensual but weird sex with semi-anthropomorphic beasties, and sibling incest. Oh, and fruits that look like human genitalia; in addition to their traveling market, the goblins could set up a Grow-Your-Own sex toys business.

Christina Rossetti would write many children’s poems, and it seems that she did publicly claim that “Goblin Market” was one of them. However, she also wrote to her publisher Alexander Macmillan that the poem was not intended for children; this suggests she was aware of the many “adult” interpretations her early masterpiece invited. That paragon of Victorian critics John Ruskin received a (prepublication) copy of “Goblin Market” from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who hoped he’d recommend it to William Makepeace Thackeray for publication in Cornhill magazine. Instead Ruskin wrote back that while his sister’s work had “beauty and power,” it was also too riddled with “quaintnesses and offenses” for the marketplace. Maybe Ruskin was only referring to Christina’s atrocious disregard for classical meter and rhyming schemes, but maybe he also had other “quaintnesses and offenses” in mind.

Ruskin (gasp) was wrong: Macmillan published Rossetti’s first commercial volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1862, to considerable acclaim from other critics. Not that the other critics were blind to certain “quaint” readings the title piece invited. I think Caroline Norton, who reviewed the book for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1863, nicely sums up the conundrum “Goblin Market” posed then, and may pose still:

“Is it a fable?—or a mere fairy story—or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love—or what is it? Let us not too rigorously inquire, but accept it in all its quaint and pleasant mystery.”

Norton does add that, in addition to working as a children’s ballad, “Goblin Market” is a piece that “riper minds may ponder over.” Lots of “riper minds” have, pondering up many allegorical interpretations: sexual/earthly love versus spiritual love, the homoerotic versus the heteronormative, a paean to female solidarity, humanity versus Faery as a parallel to upright Victorian society against foreign/otherly corruption. All that’s fine, but as a lover of the weird, I like Norton’s suggestion that we revel in the poem’s “quaint and pleasant mystery.”

Imagine the scope of the food forest these goblins have cultivated somewhere-elsewhere! Is there a lusher catalog of fruit anywhere else in poetry, or in prose for that matter? Or a “quainter” enumeration of the anthropo-zoological guises that goblins can assume? What’s in it for the goblins, this vending of fruit to maidens and maidens alone? Do they have a complicated fetish involving virgins and proxy oral sex via the virgins’ enthusiastic sucking of their ripe…almost bursting…juicy…fruit…

Because only virgin fructivores can satisfy the goblins’ quirk, they miss out on repeat customers. This is where their likeness to human dealers of addictive drugs falters. But maybe these roaming vendors are on the more malicious end of the goblin spectrum and derive wicked sustenance from the vitality that drains bit by bit from their victims. That the poison in the fruit is also its antidote is an interesting twist. I expect that since a victim can’t find the goblin market a second time, it’s always another maiden who must brave the little monsters in order to obtain fruit, with the second magical requirement being that this other maiden must truly love the first, perhaps in more than the common sisterly way.

The totally conventional ending strikes me as belonging to another and much less interesting poem. Was it meant to appease those of Rossetti’s readers who might have found the preceding stanzas unsettling ? Was it there because Rossetti herself was unsettled? She also dedicated “Goblin Market” to her sister, Maria Francesca. I guess it could have been embarrassing for Maria if the ultimate depiction of sisterhood wasn’t soothingly Victorian normal.

Nothing kinky to see here, folks. Get your nasty minds out of that gutter. And put down that Playboy, I don’t care if it was a professor who brought it to your attention. Oh, the moral perils of modern higher education!

Ruthanna’s Commentary

My longstanding association with “Goblin Fruit” isn’t particularly weird or even ominous. Instead, it’s a quote sent by the first woman I connected with through an online dating site in college. This was the late 90s, so you should be imagining less modern app or even OKcupid, and more the Personals section of the Valley Advocate translated into green-on-black text. And you should imagine my baby-bi self finally admitting that I was less interested in the gender of my dates and more interested in whether they adored mountain thunderstorms, exchanging missives with a marginally-more-experienced potential date, drinking in the promise of “bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, swart-headed mulberries, wild free-born cranberries…”—I definitely got the metaphor, but the pull-quote had no intimations of goblin men, nor of their tendency to disappear after one’s first taste of ruinous fruit.

The date itself was not so exciting as the quote, but I retained the positive—and sapphic—associations. Long-time readers will recall that I was generally inclined to find this kind of appeal where I could get it. For me the goblin market is in downtown Northampton, around the corner from the little store where I exchanged my freshman-year “straight but not narrow” button for “I’m bisexual and I’m not attracted to you,” perhaps in some shadowed corner of Thorne’s Marketplace.

Past the list of luscious produce, however, “Goblin Market” is pretty het in its centralization of female relationships. The core sisterly bond between Lizzie and Laura heralds Frozens to come. Lovers appear only metaphorically in the form of the wickedly tempting goblin men, and chastely off-screen in the form of the husbands presumably necessary for sisters to become “wives with children of their own.” The unnamed husbands are no source of fresh fruit. And a sister might be “kiss’d and kiss’d and kiss’d” as the best of possible friends, but that familial passion serves to “cheer one on the tedious way.” Husband and children, by implication, being the correct but tediously un-zaftig choice.

One doesn’t come away from this poem without yearning for fig season. Or at least this one doesn’t.

Where is the boundary between fairy story and the weird? I’m not one for sharp sub-genre divisions, but I also feel like the distinction is real. “The Hide” falls on the weird side of the blurry line, and “Goblin Market” …falls on the side of making lines less blurry. These fae exist to mark the dangers of straying from the well-lit path. Victorian anxieties haven’t quite the nuance of Lovecraftian attraction-repulsion; they offer instead attraction whose repulsiveness is only revealed through Lizzie’s carefully taste-less rescue.

Compare “Whisperer in Darkness,” where alien fae draw travelers underhill and into the cosmos. Both glory and horror are a long way from sweet-talking boys who bed and then abandon. The Mi-Go may offer the ultimate in non-physical chastity, but they also offer alternatively unimaginable pleasures. And they’re faithful if cosmopolitan companions!

Perhaps I’m being unfair to the poem, simply because the opening has lived so long in my head without the rest of the story. If only goblin men hawk remarkable fruits, and only human men offer a safe-but-tedious alternative, that reflects something of Rosetti’s realities that I shouldn’t blame her for depicting. Yet even in fairy stories, I want the lands beyond safe firelight to offer something complicated. Laura’s life ought to be richer for tasting the goblins’ hazards and hazarding their tastes. Quoth Tolkien: “In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them.” 

I’ve been fortunate enough to spend the past couple of days with my not-at-all-tedious wife and sister, chasing down a wild cosmic experience by way of a certain amount of extremely practical logistics (i.e., eclipse road trip). The best real relationships, I think, include a measure of both elevating the mundane and grounding the transcendent. A sharp line between those two aspects seems false, as does any claim that only one belongs in a good life.

I’d have Laura take more than fables from her ill-advised fruit purchase. I’d have her relationship with Lizzie gain something beyond gratitude for her rescue. I’d have her children inherit something beyond warnings. But all of these require another tale. Perhaps we could tell it over a plate of greengages.

Next week, we wrap up the last two chapters of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit! What lies beyond the Crossroads, and how many alt-riders, not to mention semi-innocent bystanders in the rest of the universe, are going to survive it?[end-mark]

The post Poetry Month 2024: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

The Path to the Dark Side: Max Gladstone’s Last Exit (Part 17)

Wonder and glory are worth a little heartache, aren’t they?

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on April 3, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 33-34. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

On the princess’s balcony, seeing both June the monstrosity and June the girl, Zelda’s torn between the conviction that they’ve reached the end of the world and the irrepressible bird-flutter of hope. “You can’t let yourself see,” June tells her. “There’s too much that’s not you in your head. But I can show you, if you let me.”

Zelda struggles toward June, Sarah beside her. High midnight arrives, and the black-flower path takes shape. At its end are the crossroads, whispering: What do you want? What will you give? Spin pours out of June. Black lightning flashes. Far off, striding to meet them, is Sal, no longer a demon but “just Sal herself.” Older, wiser, coming home. A moment later, Zelda sees only the horror of angles gone wrong, but now she knows it isn’t the truth.

June steps out onto the black-flower path.

Meanwhile, in the vizier’s room, Ish watches the black mirror resolve into the cowboy, who urges him to keep “walking the line.” He shows the image of June poised on the balcony above, the Sal-monster approaching, Sarah fallen and Zelda on her knees, eyes filled not with horror but with awe. Ramon regains consciousness. Ish knocks him out with the gun’s butt.

He struggles up to the balcony, led by the gun. June, “robed in spider legs and crowned with thorns” is on the path already. The gun raises his arm. He shoots—but Sarah knocks the bullet from its trajectory with her knack, and stands between him and June. She sees in his pale halo “the afterimage” of the cowboy’s hat. When did he yield to fear, changing from the “brave and tiny mouse” she used to imagine into “this old hand-me-down monster”? She holds her ground. Ish’s hand shakes, but the gun speaks and Sarah drops, gut-shot.

Ish was supposed to save her, save Zelda. Instead, the cowboy’s voice assures him, he’s done what was needful. June sees Sarah fallen. Distracted from the intent required to hold the black-flower path whole, she falls. Zelda lunges to catch her. Sal draws closer. Ish must go all the way, now, he thinks. He must reach the crossroads first, and so he jumps onto the path, three bullets left in his gun.

Zelda catches June’s wrist but hasn’t the strength to pull her up. Ramon, recovered from Ish’s blow, arrives; together they haul June to safety. The gravely wounded Sarah commands their attention. Zelda spots a white-hatted Ish on the path. Sarah tells her to go after him. June, Zelda sees, has expended all her spin to summon Sal. Ramon, too, is exhausted, but Zelda must trust them to get Sarah to a hospital back home while she pursues Ish.

Ramon and June carry Sarah out of the palace, but the cowboy himself now chases them. With June tending Sarah in the back seat, Ramon guns the Challenger across the drawbridge. The cowboy commandeers a robo-horse, and rides after them.

Ramon drives from alt to alt, through storm and bullets. The cowboy gains. His minions join the chase on motorcycles, in a squad car. June tells Ramon Sarah’s that fading. Of course there are more cowboys the closer they get to home: home is the cowboy’s place, and the alt-roads are his roads. Hearing this, Ramon conceives a desperate plan. His knack churning, the Challenger protesting, he veers off the road and into the dark, trailblazing.

The black-flower path abhors Ish, presses him back, makes his gun heavy and hot. Between steps, he finds himself back at college, on the Halloween fourteen years ago when he was to win Zelda, but instead she won Sal. He dodges through costumed partiers. Zelda comes up behind him. Ish, gun in hand, becomes the pursuer, Zelda the pursued. He must convince Zelda that she’s wrong about Sal and put things right. But he’s torn between the shadow under the trees, the serpent at the world’s roots, and a vision of Zelda’s hair shining in the sun.

Zelda races through the “shattering past.” None of the partiers notice the road splitting apart beneath them. Where are these kids now? Do they agonize too about whether they’ve fucked up? Whether they had any choice to begin with? She stunt-leaps across the rift, but so does Ish. They end up on the roof of the Brutalist A & A Building, Zelda and Ish and the cowboy. The cowboy offers to give Zelda what she wants out of saving the world: everything fixed, the monsters gone, herself safe at home with a girl who at least looks like Sal. Zelda realizes that the cowboy’s been inside her all along.

Ish watches the cowboy target Zelda. He tells himself to remember the serpent, but he thinks of the friends he’s failed, who are more real than either serpent or cowboy. He forces his gun up. It’s the cowboy’s gun Zelda spends her spin on fouling, while Ish’s bullet takes out the cowboy—and himself at the same time, as he knew it would.

The cowboy leaves no body. Zelda kneels by Ish’s. He lost so many times to fear and need, but at the end he understood, and won. The rest is up to her. A chain link fence at the end of the roof separates her from the crossroads. Sal taught her to climb it once. Now Zelda puts on Sal’s iron ring, says “I love you,” and climbs. She’s unfolding now, growing, seeing differently. She drops to the other side, where a hand lifts her and she hears the voice she’s missed.

“Took you long enough,” Sal says.

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Cowboy: We’re still a long way from fully learning this world. Look, new species just dropped!

What’s Cyclopean: Ramon ponders the unicorn tapestry in Elsinore: “a symbol of purity in this place of poets stripped naked at knifepoint.”

Weirdbuilding: Are the wrong angles of the beyond a violation of the physics that keep us whole, or just the distortion of looking at the shore from underwater? The Hounds of Tindalos have opinions.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Everyone this week is less sure about what counts as sane, so it’s no surprise that the wind screams and laughs in “babbling mad voices,” that a “mad world” is contrasted with the gun’s “logic,” and that the Halloween party is full of “mad voices, whispers.”

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I’m the sort of person who hears about new popular music on NPR, and who got earwormed by “Texas Hold ‘Em” in the lobby of a theater. Which in combination are why I’m writing this to the strains of Beyonce’s newly-dropped Cowboy Carter, an album that deconstructs the mythoses both of country music and of ahistorically-white cowboy movies. (It’s also what I think the kids these days call a bop. Several bops? Can an album be a bop or only an individual song?) The Cowboy would not approve.

The thing about the lie that protects civilization-as-we-know-it is that it’s a lie. The white-hatted line-walker wouldn’t care to recognize the Native American vaqueros, or the formerly-enslaved Black cowboys making their homes on the range after the Slaveholder’s Rebellion, or Annie Oakley. The lie is that there’s only one line. That to imagine alternatives is to destroy everything, to let in the serpent and Cthulhu and the inevitable robot (translated from the Czech) uprising. That there’s nothing on either side of the road but tentacles and teeth.

One nasty truth from the liar: “So long as the world’s there, we can take the things we want from it.” But that truth leads to all the lies. The ability to extract is confounded with the ability to exist. The ostensible stakes are heightened until it only makes sense to follow the logic of the gun. To do what hurts because at least that way you know you’re still walking the line.

Poor Ish. Failing to fail, failing to allow for failure, failing to allow for being wrong. And putting on the white hat, just as Zelda and Sarah and Ramon are coming around to admitting that yes, maybe Sal was right. I love the way that, as they make that admission, the imagined alternatives waver between toothy tentacle and flowering otherland—and they glimpse Sal not as monster or college-aged innocent, but as herself a natural decade older, graying and strong with her experiences. It’s not an easy switch, that change in perspective. Glimpsing it once doesn’t make you immune to the fearful illusion. But the illusion is a little weaker afterwards. The cowboy tries increasingly desperately to argue for it—first that it’s the only real option, then that it’s the only option that won’t hurt.

Wonder and glory are worth a little heartache, aren’t they?

Over the fence, on the far side of the cowboy’s reality, everything looks like metaphors and references and questions. We need such tools, to grasp at a hint of trying to understand. We’re looking at angles skewed by the water’s boundary, or we’re wading through black flowers, or we’re cracking the world’s eggshell a la Utena. (We’re also having a car chase, just in case you were wondering whether that reference was deliberate.) (And “the cowboy followed,” maybe like the gunslinger in The Dark Tower.) We’re turning off the road, questioning the assumptions of the whole road trip genre. We’re standing in the gale from the “demon wind of yes”. (James Joyce reference? Yoko Ono?) We’re running through a Halloween party where Zelda once made a choice about who to be and who to love: the first place where she imagined possibilities she hadn’t before. Where else would you find the Crossroads? Where else would you finally put on a ring and climb a fence and complete that choice you started making all those years ago?

On the other side of the fence, through the metaphors, are the questions. Who are you? What do you want? (Babylon 5 reference there, though B5 wasn’t pulling the angel’s and devil’s questions from nowhere.) Could there be a world beyond this one—no. Wrong question. What worlds are beyond this one? What dreams?

Took you long enough to ask.

Anne’s Commentary

So much is going on for Gladstone’s characters in these chapters. Still. Today I’m all about Ish.

In his first inaugural address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.” It’s decent rhetoric, but inaccurate. If you’re an alt-rider, you can legitimately fear lots of other things, like giant flying centipedes, post-apocalyptic cannibal cultists, and active lava fields. Henry David Thoreau may have come closer to the truth in an 1851 journal entry: “Nothing is to be so much feared as fear.” This assertion allows for the fear of giant flying centipedes, post-apocalyptic cannibal cultists, and active lava fields, even if you should also fear your fear of these things, since capital-F fear is more fearsome still.

Of course, the last word on anything must go to Yoda. Or should we say the first word, given he dropped his aphorisms “long, long ago”? Anyhow, he said: “Fear is the path to the dark side.” By “dark side,” he didn’t necessarily mean an actual “path of lower luminosity” ending up in a wardrobe composed entirely of black garments. Nor yet could he have meant by “path” the “black-flower” one that Gladstone mentions, what with Gladstone’s book not having been around in Yoda’s day. Not that I’d ever underestimate Master Yoda’s ability to see into the future of SFF publications.

The point is: If your fear leads you to duck giant flying centipedes before they can grasp your head in their venom-dripping mandibles, it’s a good thing. But if your fear becomes chronic, a caustic dye that stains your fundamental perception of the world and leaves you a serpent-conjuring paranoid wreck like Ish, it’s a bad thing. It amplifies your defenses into offenses.

It makes the White-Hat cowboy take notice of you, and smile. He’s so glad that you hear a snake gnawing away at the rooty underpinnings of everything, even though snakes don’t actually gnaw roots so much as, say, naked mole-rats do. The cowboy knows that metaphors don’t need to make sense to be of use to him – the opposite, in fact. They need to trigger visceral emotion. He’s thrilled that you see everywhere the shadowy forest edges where bloody deeds are done. Were done, to and by your childhood self.

There was a nervous moment for the cowboy when Ish found Zelda. When Ish imagined that the light reflected from her hair could banish his under-tree shadows, that the fire of her intellect could immolate the serpent. Luckily for the cowboy, Sal came along. First, Sal made Ish think he could win Zelda, setting him up to be crushed. Second, Sal won Zelda away from him. Third, Sal proved unworthy of Zelda by embracing the enemy rot, becoming a monster and leaving Zelda to welter in guilt because she couldn’t save Sal from monsterfication. Fourth, Sal had to have a cousin just as unworthy as she was! Another monster that fooled Zelda, making it that much harder for Ish to save her.

As for Sarah and Ramon, let them just try to snatch Ish back from the whiteness of the cowboy. He’s as doomed as any Ahab whose mortal wound is not to the body but to the psyche. The difference between the characters is that Ahab can’t be saved by Starbuck’s reminder of his family—Starbuck can’t break open his cannibal Captain’s heart with his “See, see! The boy’s face from the window! The boy’s hand on the hill!” Ahab casts the evocation of his child down, “his last, cindered apple to the soil.” Whereas Ish—

As the cowboy takes aim at Zelda, Ish still aches from his psychic wounds, still feels himself in “the shadow of the trees.” But he can look beyond the shadow to “other worlds than his. Ramon and Sarah, Zelda and Sal. Cynthia.” His friends are to him, in the end, “more real than the trees, more real than the serpent, more real than the cowboy.” The whale has become Ahab’s only reality, and so he can’t turn from his own destruction. Ish makes the emotional reconnection to his better humanity, and so can stop walking the cowboy’s line and kill him, though in full knowledge he’s gone too far into the whiteness to save himself.

Ish, I’m glad you were never meant to be a deathspian or a tragic hero lost to his fatal flaws. I’m glad you instead found your redemption.

Next week, we celebrate National Poetry Month with Christina Rossetti’s classic “Goblin Market.”[end-mark]

The post The Path to the Dark Side: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 17) appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

To Catch a Monster: Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye and Tooth”

Humans are often more monstrous than the monsters…

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on March 27, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we cover Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye and Tooth,” first published in 2023 in Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Zelda and Atticus Credit are flying coach to Dallas, Texas. Their clients used to fly them first class, eager to get rid of “whatever awful horror they’d conjured up.” Take the golf pro who shot his ex-wife to Swiss cheese, but she kept getting back up. He flew them first class, but then tried out an internet remedy of salting her undying corpse. That got his face eaten off before they even arrived. True hunters know it takes grave dirt to keep ghouls down.

Lately the internet provides more reliable information, so people are DIY-dispelling their monsters, however crudely. So, though the Credits can handle visitations from haints and river spirits to poltergeists, business isn’t great. And it’s a family business: every generation in the Credit family has been blessed with gifts that enable them to fight the world’s evils. Atticus has what Mama calls the Eye, the ability to live in two worlds, “Ours and Theirs.” Zelda’s is the Tooth to his Eye, the dark to his light.

From the airport, Zelda drives their rented truck through a thunderous deluge into increasingly flat and empty cow country. A dirt road leads them to an American-Gothic three-story backed by derelict farm equipment and a yellowed cornfield. “Some real Children of the Corn shit,” Zelda mutters. Atticus rouses himself, coming into “focus.” Zelda asks if he feels anything. Could be, Atticus replies, but it could also be Zelda’s “energy” interfering.

Their client, an older woman named Dolores Washington, greets them curtly and leads them to dinner. Lanky Atticus helps himself. Zelda passes. Even if she did eat things like the offered red beans and cornbread, something feels is off-putting. Also, the dining room’s packed with displays of dolls: porcelain, paper, vinyl, even corncob dolls in gingham dresses. Haughtily, Washington claims not to be a “collector” but a “creator.” Either way, Zelda doesn’t like the dolls. She likes less how Washington treats a six or seven year-old girl in a metal leg brace who comes into the room, to be dismissed with a sharp reprimand.

Washington says she’s heard the Credits are “real deal Black folks. Root workers and hoodoo queens.” Her grandmother worked with herbs, but what the Credits have is “power in [the] blood.” She challenges Atticus, their “Eye,” to divine her trouble. He tries but shakes his head, and grudgingly Washington describes a presence in the cornfield that’s been killing animals and screaming at night. She’s sure it’s no fox or cougar, though she won’t admit to actually seeing it. Zelda decides that, in spite of the continuing storm, she’ll investigate at once. Washington invites Atticus to bed down in her guestroom. Though Zelda hoped he could deploy his Eye during her absence, she sees he looks tired, even wan, and makes no protest. From the guestroom window, Zelda spots something moving in the cornfield as if on all fours.

Outside she meets the little girl from the dining room, rain-drenched and mute. She gestures for Zelda to follow her into the corn. Feeling “this kid ain’t just a kid,” Zelda complies. Soon they find a freshly killed and mangled animal. At last the girl speaks, one word: “Hungry.” Something sure was. Afraid it might still be nearby, Zelda brings the girl back inside.

Next morning, Zelda leaves Atticus still asleep and goes to the town hardware store for trapping supplies. Hoping for background information, she chats with the clerk. He’s glad to gossip. Rumor was that Dolores’s grandmother did away with Dolores’s abusive father. Dolores herself has become famous for her corncob dolls: among pictures of town celebrities is one showing Dolores with a child-sized doll adorned with a blue ribbon. But then Dolores’s granddaughter got her foot snapped off in an old animal trap and bled to death in the cornfield. With her daughter estranged, Dolores has been all alone out there.

Puzzle pieces begin snapping together in Zelda’s mind. The little girl. Washington’s talk about power in the blood. Atticus’s post-dinner somnolence. She races back to the farmhouse. A dead granddaughter couldn’t survive on random animal kills. She’d need what all revenants need: a human, especially a powerful one.

Washington’s not around, but the girl is upstairs on the bed beside Atticus, her mouth encrusted with his blood. Her leg brace is off, exposing a limb missing below the knee and corn husks protruding from her pants cuff. “Hungry,” the girl whispers. Before Zelda can act, a wooden knitting needle skewers her in the back. Washington cries that she won’t lose her grandchild!

Zelda spits back that Washington can’t have Atticus, and didn’t Washington’s granny tell her that magic always comes in twos, Light and Dark? She calls up her power, the same as runs in Atticus but “bent different.” Her fangs descend, her nails sharpen, and she roars as she rips out the knitting needle and feels her pain turn to clarifying exhilaration. Washington screams, but her raised hands can’t ward off “what’s next,” for now Zelda’s hungry, too.

The rain has stopped when Atticus, bandaged and still chalky from blood loss and Washington’s poisoned beans, makes it out to the truck. He looks at the little girl who sits beside Zelda, playing with a paper doll. Zelda says she can’t leave the girl alone. But there are rules: she’s told the kid no eating until they get home and Zelda can teach her how to hunt “proper.”

Atticus grunts, but Zelda knows he won’t fuss. Like Zelda, he knows that “sometimes the best monster hunters are monsters themselves.”

The Degenerate Dutch: “Granny told me about your family. Real deal Black folks.” And, therefore, expendable.

Weirdbuilding: Folk magic runs all through this story, from Zelda’s family to Washington’s Granny—both the supernatural kind of magic, and the practical kind that whips up tonics to “cure” abusive husbands.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

There was a period when my gamemaster refused to set role-playing scenarios past about 1999. Cell phones, he felt, were the bane of plot—if you can call for help at any time, or find out how the other half of your split party is doing, where’s the pressure to solve the problem yourself? Eventually he got over it—by the time smartphones came along, with the internet in your pocket, we all knew the shivers brought on by low battery and lack of signal. Then there’s the modern gothic surrealism of disinformation bubbles, of the internet as portal to the uncanny—or Zelda’s (no relation) complaint that YouTube videos take work away from traditional practitioners, with only a small chance of getting your face eaten. Maybe that irritation with modern technology is why she doesn’t carry a cellphone—leaving room for anxious races to climactic confrontations.

Zelda, it’s clear right away, only cares about clients getting eaten in-so-far as it interferes with being paid. In general, she has little interest in her clients as people worthy of sympathy. They’re monsters, hiring monster hunters to hunt monsters that they’ve created or summoned themselves. And the story’s final line comes as little surprise. From the moment we learn that Zelda can’t eat airplane food—not for the same reasons the rest of us avoid it—it seems pretty clear that her appetites are not those of an ordinary human. Her dream of waking up next to a bloody carcass seems more temptation than nightmare. So I spent most of the time going “Vampire, ghoul, werewolf, zombie…?” like some off-kilter kid’s game of pulling petals.

She’s a monster with an appreciation for culture, though—not only horror flicks like Children of the Corn with its monstrous rural kids, but classic paintings like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. That’s “that one with the girl in the field reaching for something she ain’t never gonna get.” Of the model, MOMA says: “As a young girl, [Anna Christina] Olson developed a degenerative muscle condition—possibly polio—that left her unable to walk. She refused to use a wheelchair, preferring to crawl, as depicted here, using her arms to drag her lower body along.” Perhaps Zelda has a touch of the Eye herself, given that she’s about to encounter (and adopt) a monstrous rural kid with mobility challenges.

The most monstrous monster here—as appears to be usual for Zelda—is the client. I once IDed a bad guy way before the Shocking Reveal because he threw a fit about kids enjoying Batman comics, and I pegged Washington the first time she complained about muddy floors. The woman is living out in deep farmland, but has delusions of Armitage-ness. Wanting to keep her granddaughter undead at the cost of strangers’ lives: sympathetic. Whining at those strangers about her pristine floors: nope. (Sorry, yes, I know that’s a different Jordan Peele movie.)

Making creepy corn dolls: also nope. Really, I feel bad for all the innocent doll collectors out there with houses full of staring glass eyes—horror has given them a bad rap. Though the fear apparently comes naturally: my son, who has never seen Chucky or been offered my Tara Campbell collection, consistently makes me hide away decorative dolls in AirBnBs. Ellen Datlow too has a doll-focused horror anthology—and yet. There are people whose uncanny valley is very narrow, and most of them never even once create a half-doll revenant to try and stave off the death of a loved one. Yet another point against Washington.

Final point against: she could have just asked. Zelda turns out to have exactly the expertise needed, and all the sympathy in the world for a supernaturally-hungry kid. If Washington had considered her “real deal” hunters as something other than prey, there’d have been much less need for poisons and knives. But then, if people like her could consider people like Zelda and Atticus for something beyond their immediate utility, they might’ve made a better case for Zelda’s sympathy a long time ago.

Anne’s Commentary

What with the thunderstorm that was raging when the Credits arrived at Dolores Washington’s house, I doubt Zelda thought to check the front porch ceiling. A safe bet is that it wasn’t painted the color called haint blue. The Gullah people of coastal Georgia and South Carolina traditionally painted porches, window frames, and shutters with an indigo-based blue-green. They believed doing so would prevent haints (ghosts and malicious spirits) from entering a house; either the haint would mistake this soft pale blue for the sky and pass on, or would shy away as from water, which haints can’t cross. Eventually other Southerners adopted the custom. Who wants haints in the house? Or wasps in their porchside supper—like haints, bugs are supposed to confuse a blue ceiling for the sky and to preferentially fly towards it.

I guess haint blue can discourage ghosts—my porch ceiling sports the color, and I haven’t had any ghosts yet. Wasps, sadly, aren’t fooled. They pervade the porch whenever food is available. So, yeah, blue paint for revenants, screens for bugs. In case you want to beef up your own supernatural wards, Southern Living has an article listing the exact paint brands and colors to do the job.

But if, like Dolores, you have a haint for a (more or less welcome) family member, keep away from the blue spectrum altogether. Stick to whites, or if you’re trendier, sunflower yellow. Spirits, and wasps, love that color.

What are the odds that the main character in this week’s story would have the same name as the main character in last week’s story? Not high, I’d say, particularly if the name is an uncommon one. In 2023, Zelda ranked 556th in popularity among female baby names. However, according to its Teutonic origins, Zelda signifies a woman warrior. Where monster hunting is concerned, Roanhorse’s and Gladwell’s Zeldas are that in spades. Perhaps the name was chosen for this meaning?

I’m not sure whether Last Exit Zelda’s superpower, or knack, is inborn or acquired, though it’s suggestive that cousins Sal and June develop—or express— the same knack after being exposed to the Beyond. “Eye & Tooth’s” Zelda definitely has a genetically-granted superpower—as Dolores puts it, it’s in her blood. The Credits’ powers define them: Atticus is an Eye, the organ associated both with actual light and with the moral concept of Lightness, the Seen, the Understood. Whereas Zelda is a Tooth, the organ associated with biting, killing, devouring and the moral concept of Darkness, the Taken, the Mystery.

I’ve always been deeply creeped out by these lines from Stephen King’s The Stand: “There were worse things than crucifixion [villain Flagg’s preferred method of execution.] There were teeth [another method of which Flagg was only too capable of employing.]” Tooth-Zelda convinces me further of the terror inherent in dentition.

The Eye and the Tooth share the work of defense, the first via perception, the second via action. Atticus’s ability to see into realms beyond the mundane is a major asset to the hunting pair. It’s also a weakness, for which Zelda compensates with her practical skills and a predator’s heightened awareness of her umwelt. If the Credit siblings could always work side by side, or back to back, they’d be unbeatable.

The catch for storytellers: Unbeatable protagonists make for boring narratives. Roanhorse has a surefire way around this catch: Atticus and Zelda are both monster-hunters, but Zelda is herself a monster. When she’s close to her brother, her monster-vibes can interfere with his efforts to detect other monsters, their targets. So separate they sometimes must. Another plot-nurturing workaround is that Zelda can’t always act on her monsterly intuitions and impulses. Letting her fangs and claws out around clients would be bad for business; in spite of getting all kinds of bad feelings about Dolores, she has to be polite. Dolores is rude and condescending. Dolores raises Zelda’s hackles by mistreating her granddaughter. But Zelda must remember that Dolores has a fat wad of cash in her cleavage. When you’re a monster dealing with humans, you sometimes have to let “professionalism” trump instincts. Right?

Not this time, because it almost results in Atticus becoming revenant-fodder.

Oh well, every system has its flaws. Magic, Zelda tells Dolores, “always comes in twos. Light and Dark. Eye and Tooth.” On the positive side, the Credits know that “sometimes the best monster hunters are monsters themselves.” Who can know a monster better than another monster? A legitimate corollary: Who can empathize with a monster better than another monster? This isn’t to say that humans can’t at least sympathize with monsters. Atticus isn’t happy about Zelda adopting Dolores’s revenant grandkid, but he won’t try to stop her.

Besides, humans are often more monstrous than the monsters. Take Dolores, for instance.

Please, take Dolores, including any scraps Zelda may have left.

Next week, it’s Cowboys Versus Tentacles in chapters 33-34 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.[end-mark]

The post To Catch a Monster: Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye and Tooth” appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

Question Authority But Not Your Cowboy: Max Gladstone’s Last Exit (Part 16)

We are coming on toward the titular last exit, and it’s time for revelations…

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on March 20, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 31-32. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

After their campfire “reunion,” the alt-riders separate to rest before assailing Elsinore. Zelda and Sarah help a half-asleep June into her tent, and Zelda gets a glimpse of her latest sketch. It shows the four old friends gathered around the fire, plus a fifth figure to Zelda’s right. Did June imagine Sal into the sketch, or was she aware of what Zelda perceived as “a gentle pressure on her arm”?

Alone, Zelda pulls out a much-handled sketch. It’s the one of her and Sal from June’s wall; it shows “their bodies inclined together, drawn by gravity into the hollow that parted them,” Sal looking longingly at Zelda, while Zelda gazes out “to the future.” June joins her, wide awake. “I wondered if you had taken that,” she says. “I stole it,” Zelda says, because this “beautiful clear thing” didn’t represent her and Sal’s true relationship. Zelda tried to give everything to Sal, but she was too scared.

When June asks “What happened?” Zelda knows she means at the end. Since love “demanded honesty,” she finally tells the truth.

The princess calculated that  the stars would come right on “the cross-quarter day in August.” That was long enough for the alt-riders to go home for July 4th. Zelda, however, only “haunted” the woods near her house, spying on her family. She was observing the town’s festivities from under cover when Sal unexpectedly appeared and drew her out of hiding. They’d just relaxed into a kiss when an old classmate recognized Zelda. Zelda was mortified, and when the classmate called to Zelda’s father, she spin-hopped herself and Sal away.

Back in Elsinore the princess welcomed the alt-riders, but the court (Zelda now realizes) simmered with whispers, resentments and conspiracies. The night before all went wrong, Sal opened a conversation Zelda wasn’t ready to have. Why did they need to go to the crossroads? Yes, things had to be fixed, but would the crossroads actually enable them to do the fixing? And how did they know the rot was evil? It eats worlds, Zelda said. But where do they go, Sal countered. Instead of thinking they knew best, maybe they should go to the crossroads to – just keep going, past rot and fear, past everything, and learn what’s really out there. Or else, they should go home and fix things the hard way.

Then Sal gave Zelda an iron ring, urging her to “walk together, forever. Under all stars. If you’ll have me.” Fearful of forevers, Zelda took the ring but didn’t put it on. Then, while the alt-riders slept, the princess’s enemies came for them.

Duels, poison, and blood running down stairs: that’s how Zelda describes their desperate escape. They got an injured Sal to the Challenger as the princess died. The sky broke open. Walls devoured people. Looking toward the princess’s tower, Zelda saw the black-flower road arch upward. They needed to run, but what if the road never opened again, offering this chance at otherwise-impossible safety? And so Zelda returned Sal’s ring and fought her way up to the cracking road.

Sal followed, only to be dragged into the void by shadow-legs. Zelda, struggling to pull her back, saw Sal’s features become monstrous and heard her claim the people from all the empty worlds were in the void, waiting. Just a little further…

Then Sal fell. Zelda made it back to Montana, where her friends deserted her. Zelda expects June to scorn and curse her. Instead June kisses Zelda’s crown. She glows amid her attendant shadows. We were wrong, she says. Their world isn’t real, isn’t right. It’s the cowboy’s world. Because he can’t bear what’s beyond the “last exit,” he’s made them fear it. Zelda glimpsed the truth Sal has embraced, but rejected it. June won’t do so. Sal’s coming to rescue Zelda, and June will help her.

Zelda lunges as June starts toward Elsinore, but June’s grown “mountain-tall and mighty,” and a “wind from beyond the worlds” blows Zelda back.

The alt-riders surround Zelda. What happened, Sarah demands. “I lost her,” Zelda says. “She’s going to the crossroads. To let them in.”

* * *

The Challenger and dead horses race to ruined Elsinore. This time things will be different, Zelda tells herself. She’s not going it alone. The thought that June may be right is a “pernicious lightness in [Zelda’s] chest,” a hope she must push away to do what’s necessary.

The castle’s awake, malevolently alive. They enter, each focused on their own knack. In the Great Hall, a massive shadow-snake attacks them, the serpent Ish has sensed  gnawing at the heart of the world. The serpent strikes, to be repelled by “the raw weight of [Sarah’s] refusal to let them die.” Zelda spin-shapes a path for them up the stairs to the princess’s tower. Then their flashlights die, and shadow slams down. Ish exerts all his strength to carry himself and Ramon onward, his gun his only “certainty.” Sarah and Zelda take the lead, linked together. Zelda asks Sarah if she thinks June is right. Sarah doesn’t know, but she thinks the rest of them may be wrong.

At last the alt-riders reel out onto the princess’s balcony. Her once-elegant metal-and-glass mechanisms are broken. From the edge of the balcony, under the storm, June turns black eyes to them. “Good,” she says. “You’re just in time.”

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Cowboy: How to Survive the End of the World.

What’s Cyclopean: Sal points out that metaphors matter. Rot is “our word,” but it might as easily be inflammation, or the catastrophic upthrust of tectonic plates clashing. More metaphors: the path to the Crossroads (which may themselves be a metaphor) is the “black-flower road” but also a “silver lie”. Zelda’s fear is “something she had breathed in, like a miner filling her lungs with stone.”

Libronomicon: Stories about conspiracy are meant to “communicate what’s happening to the audience”. Real conspiracy, if successfully, avoids communication with anyone who’s not involved.

Anne’s Commentary

If there’s one aphorism Zelda would buck at, it’s that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Voltaire gets credit for “le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” but years earlier Montesquieu expressed the notion in still stronger terms with “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien”—the better is the mortal enemy of the good. Another so-not-Zelda proverb is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Or as Shakespeare put it in King Lear, “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”

Whoa, Zelda could argue, our world is neither good nor unbroken! What’s wrong with bettering the bad and fixing the busted? To varying degrees, her fellow alt-riders would agree with her. To reference another great work of philosophy, if you’re not going to be a Fix-It Felix, how much better are you than a Wreck-It Ralph? At best, you’re on par with the chubby apartment dwellers who’d do nothing but sit whining in the Ralph-Wreckage if they didn’t have a Felix to rescue them. But is it their fault they don’t have superpowers like Felix’s magic hammer or Zelda’s rot-fighting knack? Maybe. Maybe everyone could develop the super-knack latent in their innermost needs and fears if they really tried. So what if society’s game programmers designate you as a Bad Guy? Remake yourself into a Good Guy by putting your Evil Skillz to Good Uses! All you may need is to meet a pesky but charismatic kid like Vanellope or Zelda to kickstart your heroism!

Zelda has kickstarted Sal, Sarah, Ramon and Ish into doing way more than dorm-room jaw about righting a screwed-up world. Later she kickstarts June, who actually didn’t need more than a toe-tap to put her on the alt-road. It’s not that the OG alt-riders never have doubts—eventually their doubts grow big enough to sour them out of the crossroads crusade for a decade. All except for Zelda, who persists in Fixing Things on a smaller scale during those ten long years.

In Chapter 31, Zelda finally tells June the whole story about the failed crusade and losing Sal. Particularly significant is how at the eleventh hour Sal pushed Zelda into a long-needed conversation, for which Zelda was still not ready. After two grueling years on the road, “a gaping uncertainty packed with tangled questions” continued to underlie all the friends’ adventures, not only unvoiced but unthinkable – for Zelda, anyway. Sal had been able to think about them; now, not in spite of her loyalty to Zelda but because of it, she faced the uncertainty and voiced the questions. What do we want, Zelda? Why are we here? Why do we need the crossroads?

Fix-It Zelda’s repeated answer, spoken or tacit, was: To fix things. In addition, she wanted Sal, she wanted to wear Sal’s iron ring and to “walk together, forever. Under all stars,” but she couldn’t fix the part of herself that feared forever and doubted that she deserved it. As for the rot, the nature of which Sal questioned, Zelda’s answers were still terser: The rot must be evil because it’s what they see when things go wrong. Because it eats worlds and vanishes stars. Somehow, the crossroads hold the key to destroying rot and achieving the Big Fix. Because the crossroads are about to open, yes, Sal, “we’re really going to do this.”

Sal proposed alternatives, either to follow the crossroads to find out what was beyond the rot, or to return home and figure out what they could fix there. They knew too little about what their own world was and could be. What if they could only bring to the alts what they’d seen and been told back home? What if back home, instead of living their own reality, they’d been “trapped inside someone else’s dream”?

Whose dream, though? The truth came to Sal as she fell into a darkness that might not be “insectile and many-jointed with inhuman geometries,” but “something else, deep and black and clear as night,” sounding not with screams but song. The people from all the empty worlds they’ve traveled weren’t ravished away. They escaped. They left him.

It takes June, transforming into something as “mountain-tall and mighty” as Sal, to tell Zelda who the “him” is. The alt-riders have been wrong. The cowboy whose voice they’ve heard, whose specter they’ve fled, he’s the one the vanished have escaped. What the alt-riders have believed to be their world, the real and right one, isn’t real or right or even theirs, but his, the cowboy’s, filled with his small dreams and barren shadows. Doesn’t Zelda see that they could be so much more? June saw the truth the first time Zelda took her into the alts—Sal touched her way back then, only June hadn’t trusted what Sal showed her because it wasn’t what she thought she knew. Never mind. Sal’s coming to rescue Zelda, whom she loves, and June is going to help her.

Ish doesn’t seem to have had much time, or breath, to crow that he told his friends so about June. If only they’d listened! Well, he’s got his gun; it’s what guides him even in the living darkness of Elsinore. What can its target be except the one who’s waiting for them on the princess’s balcony?

Sorry, Ish. I’m hoping there’s no earthly caliber that can drop June now.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

We are coming on toward the titular last exit, and it’s time for revelations. Some quiet and domestic, some world-shaking—not that the world has ceased shaking at any point since we came onto the highway.

Or: how do I talk about chapters that question and perhaps reveal the nature of reality? I’ve guessed for many posts now that the rot was something more, as real rot is something more, is what keeps the world from being buried in bones, and trees from continuing to turn into fossil fuel. But I’ve also doubted that “anything but this” is actually a good choice. Sal, too, asked: do we go see what’s beyond the lies we’ve learned, or do we stay home and work to fix things the hard way? Can we actually stand to work on the ground, after we’ve glimpsed the possibility of eucatastrophe?

Of course her engagement ring is made of cold iron, the thing that breaks magic. Come live with me in the truth, she says, with all its discomfiting complexity.

In college, my obsession with fictional religions grew around stories of holy clowns. In Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Bokononism promises up front that it’s a lie, but a lie that will get you through life and bring you to something worthwhile anyway. Discordianism is just a joke until it isn’t: the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. One of those great truths is that reality is what hurts your foot when you kick it, even if you don’t believe. And on the flip side: we understand so little of reality that we cannot help but believe in illusions. Taken to its extreme that brings us Platonic dualism, that abiding idea that the world that we see is a prisoning illusion, perhaps forced on us by some evil power. Dualism can cause great harm, convincing people that the world we see isn’t worth fixing, that we might even benefit from breaking it so that the cave crumbles and the true stars shine through.

And the flip side of that is Lovecraft’s fear of breaking the illusion and losing every valuable thing that it offers: the lie of the cowboy, and of Ish. Walk the line. Follow the light of the gun. Make money and take power and never, never look down.

Flip again. Adrienne Maree  and Autumn Brown’s How to Survive the End of the World is one of my favorite podcasts, an ongoing exploration of what it means to go through the end of the only way of life we know and come out the other side. In one episode, they draw a tarot reading and talk about the Sun card. Their interpretation: we who are trying to build a better world must “make our own sun” that draws people to its beauty and warmth. We must make the alternative where people can see how beautiful it is. Not just rejecting the cowboy’s lie, but offering another version of reality that can be welcomed. As the alt-riders keep saying, how can you wish for—ask for, demand—something whose form you’ve never imagined?

Flip again: how can you change what you’ve been sheltered from seeing?

The Challenger (well-named) is increasingly clearly the voice of the cowboy, who we now know Zelda first heard ten years ago at Elsinore. (Maybe going home for July 4^th wasn’t the wisest move?) The American Illusion is embodied in cars and highways as well as guns and white hats. But I write this in the passenger seat on a road trip, coming home from Chicago. Our householdmate Sam passed away a month ago from complications of cancer; this weekend we returned her mother home, brought her unfinished projects to her beloved knitting group to finish. The bins filled the back of our minivan. It would have been a different and much more difficult trip by train or bus. World-burning cars, and the community-splitting highways they ride, give us the power to show our love in ways we couldn’t otherwise.

Ish holds a gun in one hand and supports Ramon with the other. The illusion doesn’t make the love experienced within its boundaries illusory. But it also doesn’t change that he’s going to the crossroads with a gun, and with no willingness to acknowledge that he might be wrong. That there might be something worth walking beyond the line.

The path to the crossroads lies open. Everything beyond it lies open, to those willing to question their assumptions. And everything before it lies open to those who won’t. It’s beautiful, and it’s terrifying. The central question remains: what’s scary? And what do we do about being this scared?

Next week, we follow along with a pair of very specialized hunters in Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Eye and Tooth.” You can find it in Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror.[end-mark]

The post Question Authority But Not Your Cowboy: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 16) appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

The Shortest Swamp Thing Saga: Sara Omer’s “Marshman”

Wetlands and cryptids are becoming something of a trend…

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on March 13, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we cover Sara Omer’s “Marshman,” first published in The Dark in March 2024. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

You (a cryptozoologist) have been summoned from your university to a “sprawl of swampland” called Sumpit. Deep in the marsh is a dried-up bog in which peat extractors found a well-preserved body of baffling morphology. Archaeologists have recovered additional bodies both ancient and recent. Initially they called in an entomologist. That speaks to just how anomalous the first body is.

From the Sumpit welcome center, you and other expedition members board a swamp boat and head out over murky water into the falling night. One passenger totes a pack bulging with climbing gear. Another shoulders a rifle. Usually you travel with a docuseries camera crew and “special guests”: psychic mediums and “superstitious fanatic conspiracy theorists, the kind who think the government covers up all things supernatural.” For you, though, cryptozoology is “a social science, a study in human psychology, history, and local cultures instead of the occult.”

Your destination is a relatively dry clearing beside the target bog. It’s overhung with Spanish moss; tiki torches reveal an unnerving number of tarp-covered bodies and a moldering shack before which federal investigators mutter into walkie-talkies. An archaeologist wants to tell you how ancient cultures used the conserving properties of peat bogs for burial grounds, but you’re more interested in the shack. From the darkness beyond its broken door, a hum seems to emanate, an alluring song that’s probably an artifact of your exhaustion. You’re told the building’s abandoned, but the sleeping bags and litter suggest recent visitors.

The archaeologists show you the original body, a humanoid creature with chitinous wings and exoskeleton, wide-set bugging eyes, and a beak instead of a nose. You think of the Carboniferous millipedes as big as cars, and the Permian dragonflies with three-foot wingspans. The wings of this “mothman” are even larger. The next body is covered with matted fur and has dangling limbs  like an orangutan’s. What’ll be next, a werewolf, a cloven-hoofed devil? You’d conclude that some psychopath is pulling a hoax, except that some of the bog-pickled corpses have been lab-dated to thousands of years old. When you bring up the recent disappearance of a “beauty pageant runner-up” visiting Sumpit, an archaeologist scoffs that none of the bodies could be hers.

You could identify the bodies, or you could say sorry, evidence inconclusive (though that would be a lie) and do the tourist thing in a quaint town nearby, trying to forget about what might have ruled the swamp a few centuries back. Instead you ask about the shack. The pit, the portal, a gate, you’re told. A “carved-out cavern” discovered under a mildewy dresser. Spelunkers in climbing harnesses and helmets are already heading there to explore. You should go, you think. You should go with them, you say, your voice sounding disconnected. In case they find something down there…

Maybe you should have asked more questions, like who built the shack over the pit; what could have been the relationship between humans and cryptids; how old was that oldest body again; how many people go missing in Sumpit every year. Instead you follow the spelunkers into “an abyssal portal in the damp earth,” where a siren hum murmurs an invitation…

The cable lowering you snaps ten minutes into your descent and you “sink into that place where monsters with too many eyes live, slinking out from their subterranean cities only to seek bridegrooms and vittles and honor their dead.”

* * *

The narrator now reveals themself to be a forensic pathologist, examining the gnawed bones that were all the authorities finally recovered of you—and speculating about your final hours. Did you ever find that missing Miss Peach Blossom contestant? Can’t tell much from the photos you took down there in the dark. By the way, the cryptids didn’t have their servants bury you in the bog. They just tossed you and your smashed camera out, like garbage.

The government has tried to cover up the marshman incident by filling in the pit—you should get a kick out of that, given your skepticism about conspiracy theories. The trouble with Sumpit is that every time the government seals a cavern with soil and gravel, the marshmen excavate another one, someplace else in the swamp.

What’s Cyclopean: Bog gas gives the illusion of mountain peaks of “Olympic proportions.”

Libronomicon: You wonder if these bodies come from some prankster working “Victor Frankenstein style”.

Mythos Making: All the rumored cryptids, or at least the bipedal ones, live in cosmopolitan harmony together under the earth. What do they do when they aren’t kidnapping and killing humans?

Anne’s Commentary

Wetlands begin to trend here on Reading the Weird—a couple posts back we discussed Liz Williams’s “The Hide,” set in Somersetshire, England. This week, based on the featured flora and fauna, we visit an unspecified state in the US South. Omer lives in “the woods outside of Atlanta” and the missing pageant contestant hoped to be Miss Peach Blossom, so her setting might be Georgia. Apart from my personal preference for always knowing where in the world is Anne M. Pillsworth, the exact location isn’t crucial. Swamps, marshes, bogs and bayous pop up (or more accurately, sink down) in all but the most arid landscapes, and a good thing, too. These mucky places provide refuges for rich biotas and veritable cauldrons for evolution.

We may not particularly like what has come out of those cauldrons. Mosquitoes, gnats, biting flies, leeches, and ticks are all the vampires I ever need to meet in the watery-woodsy places. Add cryptids, and you’re in for real fun, as long as you’re just curled up in front of a monsters-among-us “reality” show and not slogging through their natural habitats without a script or field-tested anomaly repellent. Speaking of repellents, here’s a PSA from our own intrepid reporter on the cryptid beat, Carl Kolchak:

“While Beastie-Be-Gone, Inc. claims that its monster repellent is truly polyvalent, don’t bet on it. I’ve found that only the Cryptilator line of repellents approved by Miskatonic University Laboratories are at all effective, and then only if you know exactly what category of monster you’re going to encounter. Sure, you can stuff your backpack with a can each of AntiFurry, AntiReptilian, AntiArthropod, and AntiAquatic Cryptilators, but try fishing out the right one while you’re on the run in the pitch dark. As for anti-cosmic-horror repellents, they’re so targeted to each species (and even sub-sub-species!), you’d need a moving van to carry them all, and even then, without precisely chanted potentiator-incantations, your ass will likely be grass.”

Thank you, Carl.

Carl adds that the cryptozoologist in Omer’s forensics report was probably doomed from the start because CONSPIRACY! He declined to go into detail about his suspicions (because CONSPIRACY!), but he did whisper these portentous words into my ear: CHECK THE SECOND PERSON NARRATION.

Say no more, Carl. As soon as I saw that Omer was using the second person, my own CONSPIRACY!-detecting radar pinged. Of all the points of view, second person is the sneakiest. To start with, what’s the point of choosing the second over the first or third persons? Some contend that the second person drops the reader right into the story, as in YOU, hey YOU, READER-PERSON, you’re here and experiencing this! This is YOUR story, kid, not quite Choose-Your-Own-Path because you’re not doing the choosing, but still….

I’ve never bought simplistic immediacy arguments for second person, in the sense that the reader really accepts they’re the YOU character and participating in the story. Take “Marshman”: I know I’m not a cryptozoologist, well, not a professional with university creds, anyhow. I also know I’m not currently in Sumpit but sprawled at home, Kindle in hand, Monsters-Among-Us TV playing companionably in the background. Never mind that I would never approach a potential Mothman without my trusty AntiArthropod Cryptilator in one hand, my SemiAnthropomorphic Extermination Booster in the other.

Often the actual narrator of a second person piece is an above-the-stage omniscient addressing the reader as “you” to draw them in. This presupposes the omniscient narrator has the puppet-master power to so thoroughly manipulate the reader’s sensibilities and emotions that they believe themself the one-YOU-fits-all protagonist.

I, admittedly, put a cynical slant on the technique.

For me, a neater take on second person is one featuring a third person limited narrator rather than an omniscient one. That is, there’s a character in the story who is either observing another character’s actions (thinking of the other character as you) or speculating about another character’s past, present, or future actions (again, thinking of them as you rather than Tom, Dick or Harriet, as the case might be.)

An especially nice trick is to couch a first person narrative in second person prose. I call this mode first person once removed. An example is Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, in which the protagonist has plentiful psychological reasons for distancing himself from his past excesses. It’s not I who did those things back in 1980s NYC, it was you, the person I am no longer.

My first read-through of “Marshman,” I figured Omer was using this first person once removed variation, with the cryptozoologist writing in the second person to achieve distance from whatever trauma they suffered in Sumpit. But the end of the story reveals that it’s not the cryptozoologist who’s telling their story. It’s the forensic pathologist who’s studying the cryptozoologist’s “gnawed over bones” and who has written the preceding narrative by way of interrogating the deceased about their final hours. Is this the pathologist’s standard approach to the job or—

Or is it something more sinister, suggesting a CONSPIRACY! is afoot in Sumpit? This pathologist knows way too much about the autopsy subject, and way too much about Sumpit’s secret attractions. They know the extent of the cryptozoologist’s skepticism about cryptids and conspiracy theories, and are rather too amused when the cryptozoologist is proven wrong. They know what awaited the cryptozoologist at the bottom of the pit: a “place where monsters with too many eyes live, slinking out from their subterranean cities only to seek bridegrooms and vittles and honor their dead.” Poor cryptozoologist, who rated becoming just vittles, not a consort or object of post-mortem veneration. Happy cryptozoologist, maybe, never to learn how often the government has had to fill in Sumpit hellholes, only to have the marshmen excavate new ones.

We’ll have to leave that appalling truth for Carl to root out. Last I heard from him, he asked me to send a few dozen pairs of socks and boxer shorts to an Atlanta post office box—mud, swamp slime,  and mildew are rough on a gentleman’s unmentionables, it seems.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Cryptids are fascinating—but also a category so fuzzy that it raises the question of why we treat it as a category at all. They’re creatures (usually animals, though cryptobotany is its own underrated field) that are rumored but not clearly demonstrated to exist. How long do you have to search before that failure-to-find makes a cryptid? We needn’t ask how long before a species exits the category the other way, into the realm of the definitively imaginary: the field is in part defined by the tenacity of its practitioners.

Nor are they entirely unjustified in their optimism. Cornucopias of new species are discovered every year—here’s a recent batch from the ocean off New Zealand. Medieval bestiaries mixed plausible descriptions of dragons with dubious descriptions of camels. Eighteenth century British zoologists thought the platypus was a hoax, though of course Australian aborigines knew better. Coelacanths were long-extinct until they weren’t. Why not Mothman, Mkole-Mbembe, or a whole species of one-to-a-remote-lake plesiosaurs?

As a child, I was fascinated by the liminality of these creatures, the sense that they weren’t merely unproven but somehow transgressive. They weren’t supposed to exist, and seeing one would force you to update your model of the world in some painful and frightening way. Mothman particularly kept me up at night: what if I looked out the window and saw him hovering there, eyes glowing? If he wanted to traipse around in the woods without being noticed, that would be one thing, but why look in human windows other than to provide malign revelation? (That watching humans in brightly lit rooms might fascinate mothmen and owls alike did not occur to me.) And meeting his eyes, that would be the equivalent of inviting a vampire across the threshold, permitting all sorts of intrusion that would remain impossible if I just. Didn’t. See. I kept my shades closed tight.

Child-me would doubtless fascinate Omer’s second-person cryptozoologist. After all, they’re more interested in the psychology of belief than in the cryptids themselves, albeit willing to say whatever it takes to earn a paycheck on TV. The TV shows, presumably, also allow an opportunity for up-close study of the other “special” guests.

(As a side note, I initially took it as a symptom of this greater interest in humans than cryptids that our cryptozoologist didn’t blink at an alligator near a peat bog: I’m familiar with peat bogs as a cool northern phenomenon, and cypress knees and Spanish moss and gators as the province of my beloved Gulf Coast swamps. But apparently peat bogs hidden amid southern wetlands are really a thing—oday I learned! End of digression—we were talking about Mothman.)

The idea that cryptids aren’t merely undiscovered, but violate our comfortable ideas about what ought to exist, feeds into much weird fiction. What’s Cthulhu, after all, if not the ultimate cryptid, able to munch on any coelacanth or megalodon that swims into range? Mira Grant’s Rolling in the Deep follows some tv-loving cryptozoologists into an unlooked-for encounter, rather grander in scale than Omer’s. Lovecraft and Bishop’s Mound people are known mostly through local rumor, and occasionally abscond with surface-dwellers who get too close. Gnoles peer through peepholes and do unspeakable things to unfortunate thieves. Even the Nameless City raises the specter of the thing you thought was safely gone that isn’t, quite.

All these stories focus on one species, living among its own. I’m intrigued by Omer’s more diverse community of Marshmen—have they all fled underground to escape human unbelief, or just human miners and hunters and documentary photographers? Or do their depredations on visitors, which are sure to attract more unwelcome attention, indicate that they lurk largely in service of their predation?

And what else do they do with their time? I hope that between trying to discourage peat mining, the mothman-bigfoot families get to sit around in their cozy underground dens, telling creepy stories about surface-dwelling naked apes—and that those stories keep teenaged mothmen up after their bedtimes, trying to avoid looking through the peepholes lest they meet… something’s… eyes.

Next week, the Crossroads beckon in chapters 31-32 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.[end-mark]

The post The Shortest Swamp Thing Saga: Sara Omer’s “Marshman” appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

These Songs Are True: Max Gladstone’s Last Exit (Part 15)

At least the apocalypse is better than a class reunion…

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on March 6, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 27-28. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

After escaping the Green Glass City, the alt-riders travel through grasslands populated by giant insects. They gas up the Challenger in a rusted town (they call it Quarantine) but don’t stay the night – Sarah and Ramon sense the hovering presence of the cowboy, and the place may not be as deserted as it looks. The roads running to the lake are suspiciously well-maintained. Ramon glimpses something moving beneath the foul waters, one huge thing perhaps, or “a body composed of many parts, the way a city would look from high up.”

Zelda guides them through alts until they find a circle of vehicles set upright on their bumpers. Not our Nebraska “Carhenge”; ideas recur across alts. They camp within. Here, far out on “the edges,” Ish says that you can feel the rot, eating away at everything. June frowns, but doesn’t take open exception. That Ish later converses with June as she sketches may mean he’s reconciling with her, but Ramon feels Ish is trying too hard to seem at ease.

The next morning Ramon finds Ish exercising his wounded shoulder and asks if he’s okay. “There’s not a lot of okay going around,” Ish says. Look at the way the cracks in the sky are growing together into gaps of “pure absence.” And—does Ramon think Zelda really wants to stop Sal? Or will she do anything to get Sal back, as Ish would if his beloved were lost, even though he knows what’s “out there.” He’s known ever since his childhood battles with bullies. Out there is sheer “power and will. Whatever its flaws, their own world isn’t that.

Their own world is that, Ramon says angrily, and Ish’s work has worsened the problem. Their choice isn’t between “cages and the rot,” for all that Ish narrows his worldview to visions of a golden day in college when he was unafraid, believing he and Zelda could cure the world.

* * *

The alt-riders travel on toward Elsinore. Zelda’s wounds are slow to heal; she takes Sarah’s pain-pills to sleep but can’t afford woozy mistakes while alt-hopping. Despite a growing storm-tension in the air, Zelda feels her party’s rising excitement—they’re like retired greyhounds who see the metal rabbit again. They reach the Mississippi and follow it south.

Elsinore appears in the distance, looming on a hilltop over barren land, “swollen with battlements and silence…more tumor than structure.” Zelda hoped that the rot might ebb from Elsinore, but even from afar she sees how its stone bubbles. Its windows move when unobserved. Where did the people go, June asks. The rot took them, Ish answers. Zelda tells herself she has a chance to banish the rot, to fix her mistake, but what then? Without the mistake, will she become “a witch after the end of magic,” whether in a world renewed or in one as messed up as ever? Still, there has to be something better.

The night before they reach Elsinore, the alt-riders debate how to get through the castle to the watchtower from which the way to the crossroads will open at “high midnight”. Then, if they make it to the crossroads, they’ll “wall away the rot.” Which, June says, will also wall away Sal and whatever else is out there. And so save their world, Ish says, which is a better place than any they’ve seen in the alts.

Like June, Sarah’s dubious about the “better” place. To find something in the alts, you have to be able to see it, and she’s hard-pressed to “even think better in a way that does not make [her] flinch.” Her mind returns to her kids, and she knows they must do whatever they can to save them.

The conversation shifts from the uncertain future to the past when Sarah says she’s glad they’re all together; whatever the dangers, this beats the ten-year college reunion she attended. They reminisce about Yale and try unsuccessfully to remember a school song. Ramon sings not a school song but one he heard freshman year, Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child.” It made him think, even then, that he and his friends had “a huge pit of time” ahead of them. He knew they “were children and that [they] weren’t anymore, and [they’d] never be again.” He “was remembering us, even when we were still there.”

No one wants to “go to sleep, after that or ever.” They tell stories until dawn and, staring into the campfire, they don’t “see the sky broken overhead.”

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Cowboy: This week, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg shared cool stuff in her newsletter, including a much-appreciated introduction to Siberian folk-rock band Otyken. Have some joy for the road.

What’s Cyclopean: No coincidence that it’s Ish who points to “the gunshot glass sky”.

Libronomicon: “The river could boast a handful of novels—a form whose name meant ‘new.’” June quotes East of Eden on “how hard it is to get anything to grow anywhere.”

Ruthanna’s Commentary

There’s something wrong with time in Quarantine… okay, yes, when I typed it out that way I got the joke. But there is, really. Gasoline goes bad, unusable, in 3-6 months. Twinkies get moldy—insert half an hour of rabbit hole research here—somewhere between the 45 days at which they are officially “no longer at their best,” and the 8 years at which scientists became interested in the Mysterious Fungi that got into one abandoned package, or maybe the 30 years and running that a Twinkie has sat unmolested under glass at the George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, Maine.

My point is that in a world not shaped by the expectations of visitors, moldy Twinkies do not go with usable gasoline, any more than well-tended roses go with rotting wood and looted stone and pothole-free roads and abandoned fields. Either someone has been very selective with a decay-spewing raygun, or something else is going on.

And something else is certainly going on. Ish tells a story about how he knows “what’s out there, beyond the firelight.” It’s a story of purely mundane childhood horror, and what happens when someone with no stops is told that in order to deal with bullies he needs to learn to hit back. “Whatever’s true about the world back home,” he says, “it’s not that.” But it’s a story of that very world! Even beyond Ramon’s arguments about sheltered privilege and kids in cages, this is literally something that happened to Ish on Earth. Not in the alts, and not due to the Rot.

Throughout this week’s chapters, people point out that the alts are an “out there” based on what the travelers have already experienced “in here.” “The alts are paths we can see. Like dreams,” Zelda says, and Sarah says that “If you want to find something in the alts, you have to be able to see it.” And yet, they keep drawing big general conclusions from what they find. Only June suggests that this is a strange and miserable sort of solipsism.

So if the alts are the limits on what a bunch of quest-seeking Yalies could imagine, they aren’t yet beyond the firelight at all. What is beyond the visible? Sal says that after you get past its tentacular appearances the Rot is beautiful – but is that the only option for real change? Some weeks it feels like the incarnation of a desperate “anything would be better than this”. Is there a secret third thing, other than the Cowboy’s status-quo-protecting lies and the Rot’s roll-a-die deadly change?

Ramon says so. And Zelda sees dimly the existence of other options, even if they “hold their tongue” with her. She talks about older stories, indigenous ones, in a gorgeous paragraph about adaptation and survival: “Legends and myths, jokes and tall tales and memories, stories for children and stories old women told to other old women, a whole ecosystem of breathing, fluttering, bright-plumed stories ancient before the first Viking touched this continent.”

And Chapter 30 dives into the true sources of the “rules” of the alt-riders’ road: jazz and blues and hip-hop, poets and storytellers, Mark Twain and Brother Blue, Arlo Guthrie (okay, really Steve Goodman, but I can’t help my roots) and Clearance Clearwater Revival (though I also have to hat-tip Tina Turner’s “rough” version of “Proud Mary”). And not coincidentally, this discussion opens up American stories beyond the road trip: trains and steamships and anti-capitalist ballads.

But the alts are all built around pothole-free roads through apocalypse: even fields of molten magma are crossed by usable highways. In a weird way, it’s cars beyond which they can’t see. It’s the myth of individualism, the great sacrifice of lives and ecologies for a “freedom” bound to specific paths.

Zelda suggests that the alt-riders are held back, in part, by the fear that they’ll put themselves out of jobs—which is supposed to be what activists are going for. A witch after the end of magic should still have plenty to do. But like too many others, the gang’s gone from imagining a better world to imagining keeping the status quo from getting worse.

At least the apocalypse is better than a class reunion.

Anne’s Commentary

Here are another two chapters in which our heroes, having fought their way through perilous encounters, alt-hop onward while licking their physical and mental wounds. Either they’re mired in introspection or they’re splitting into pairs to hash over chronic traumas and to express doubts about the outcome of their quest. As usual, Ramon can divert himself by tinkering on the Challenger, June by drawing in her sketchbook, but when Zelda’s not guiding the party, she’s left to brood and blame herself for getting them into this whole mess to begin with.

Get over yourselves, I want to tell the variously fretted crew. Keep focused. Carry the hell on. The best parts of these connective chapters are the bits of weird travelogue, like the description of the “rusted town” where they stop for gas. Choice details abound. The neighboring lake is “green and greasy, and under its surface something moves, either “one huge twisting thing” or “a body composed of many parts.” The latter could be a horrible composite monster, like the giants of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” Or it could be what Ramon’s reminded of: a city seen from high above. That could explain why all the town buildings made of stone appear to have been taken apart block by block, and yet none of these blocks remain. Given the roads to the lake still run “straight and clear,” the missing stone could have been transported to the foul mere to construct an underwater town. An underwater town for aquatic invaders? For formerly terrestrial townspeople turned aquatic?

More choice details: A Care Bear sits on the counter of the abandoned gas station, where junk-food offerings have shelf-squatted so long even the immortal Twinkies have molded. One house, decently shuttered, boasts “a full glory” of roses, which suggests a constant gardener remains in what Ramon dubs “Quarantine, Wisconsin.” The town might have been quarantined at the onset of this alt’s troubles, while its inhabitants succumbed to some deeply transformative illness.

That’s the story I’ve come up with. Doubtless this brief but intriguing morsel of road-narrative could inspire a dozen others.

To return to my cri de coeur above. When I go from a chapter like 28 to ones like 29 and 30, I do get jolted by the sudden braking between action and transition. I do get impatient when the alt-riders wallow again in their past and present woes. Upon reflection, I realize that words like “jolted” and “wallowed” are unfairly derogatory, and that impatience with the characters is unproductive.

Unproductive? Of what? When Ruthanna first proposed Last Exit for the blog, I remember her saying she felt there was something in the novel she wanted to get at. Having read this far, I better understand what she meant. There is something here, as much in the angsty-talky bits as the action sequences and concept explication.

The alt-riders huddle around their campfire on the night before embarking on the last act of their quest. Zelda attempts to put their plan of action as simply as possible. When the path to the crossroads opens, they’ll walk it. They’ll get to the crossroads. They’ll wall away the rot. June doesn’t buy this plan, since it would mean walling away Sal and the Beyond itself. Ish backs Zelda, equating the “walling out” with saving their world. June persists in quibbling: “Their” world may be better for Ish, but what about everyone else? Sarah intervenes. Could they have found a better world, when to find something in the alts, you have to be able to imagine it?

I think Sarah means that in the alts—all the possible worlds—one must be able to imagine a world before it can exist: Mind creates world, the interior the exterior. But can one imagine something never seen, never experienced, something conjured ex nihilo? Doctor Sarah must appreciate the complexity of interactions between an individual and their environment. Interactions between all individuals and the macroenvironment must be astronomically complex; Sarah finds it hard to even “think better in a way that does not make [her] flinch.”

Why should she flinch? I believe it’s because she and her friends are united in a conviction amounting to this: The perfect world must be one of equity. How is one person to imagine this? Is a collective imagining even possible, and if so would the collective need to include every individual in the broken world?

Sarah concludes that even the grossly imperfect wastelands they’ve traveled are easier to bear than the struggle for One Good World. “Sick, but easier.” She’s sure of one thing: Even if they all die tomorrow, she’s glad they’re together now . They’re the people in the Paul Simon song Ramon remembers during their nightlong “reunion,” the ones “The Obvious Child’s” Sonny recalls while thumbing through his yearbook:

“Some have died
Some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there”

But they’re also the ones who:

“…said these songs are true
These days are ours
These tears are free”

I’m still figuring out what the “something” is in Last Exit that makes the “rumination” chapters essential rather than overdone. It may involve the balance of introspection and action, interior and exterior, the necessity for the reader to dwell in the characters’ minds long enough to make that campfire coming-together truly poignant. To make us care what becomes of these people because however fantastic their situation, they are real.

They are real.

Next week, join us for a cryptozoologically tasty treat, in Sara Omer’s “Marshman.”[end-mark]

The post These Songs Are True: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 15) appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

Square House, Door in Front: Kiera Lesley’s “Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom”

Little Shop of Horrors meets The Good Place.

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on February 28, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we cover Kiera Lesley’s “Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom,” first published in Nightmare Magazine in September 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Being the text of a letter left by the unnamed former owner of a townhouse for the purchaser:

Former owner (FO) congratulates the purchaser on the acquisition of their new home, then wastes no time getting to an epic apology. The purchaser may have wondered why no seller’s name was listed on the contract and why the price of the property was so low. In FO’s defense, standard contracts don’t cover supernatural problems, nor do most inspectors have the expertise to detect them. Admittedly a little too late, FO must explain what’s wrong with the upstairs bathroom.

Shortly after FO moved in two years ago, they accidentally caught a monster. They had just finished installing a hose attachment to the bathtub and were cleaning the tub when they slipped, dropping the hose shower head and falling through the world. Something spiky thrashed in the in-between space along with them, “spraying howls of obscene colours.” When FO came to, the room smelled of ammonia and ash, and hammering filled the household pipes. The howling of neighborhood dogs added to the racket. After a restless night, FO called in a plumber, Dean.

The twisted shower hose in the tub and the droplets from FO’s nosebleed told Dean the problem: FO had got “one of those.” See, before these townhouses went up, building code changes allowed builders to lay pipes more cheaply. The area was always “a bit thin,” but the plumbing shortcuts made it much easier for accidental snares to catch the demons that normally used pipe angles to skitter between dimensions. The demons weren’t interested in hanging around humans, because they fed on “extended pain vapours,” and humans didn’t suffer long enough to be worthwhile prey. Dean could almost sympathize with FO’s demon, just out hunting only to be suddenly imprisoned in a St. Kilda townhouse!

FO was less sympathetic. Dean recommended a priest. Father Trevor came, but all his holy water and Latin chants had no effect. He recommended trying not to irritate the demon. So FO shut up the bathroom and tried to go about their business.

A closed bathroom door didn’t stop the nightmares. From vague but overwhelming feelings of doom, sadness, and “half-remembered agonies,” they transitioned into specific horrors of dismemberment, evisceration, imprisonment in foreign lands, family members murdered. It was the demon’s way of reminding FO that it was “stuck and hurting.”

FO called in other religious leaders, to no avail. Psychics wouldn’t enter the house. Scientists denied anything weird was going on. Therapists offered cognitive-behavioral treatment for FO’s sleep dysfunction and anxiety. FO faced an unprecedented ethical dilemma.  Freeing the demon from its plumbing prison would be as simple as removing the shower hose from the upstairs tub, but what if the demon didn’t pass on to another dimension? That could amount to loosing a pain-feeding monster on humanity. Suggestions for killing the thing required stuff like plutonium and extra-dimensional cursed objects, neither of which FO had ready accessible.

FO decided to at least be a compassionate jailer, and started to feed the demon by torturing animals. Some “sacrifices” relieved FO of their terrible dreams, but only briefly. After an excruciating eighteen months, FO realized that they weren’t feeding the monster with the animals’ pain but with FO’s own emotional suffering from inflicting torture.

They also realized that while the demon was stuck in the house, they were not.

They hope that the purchaser won’t hate them. Maybe the demon, angry only at its summoner, will leave the purchaser alone, or the purchaser will prove smarter and braver than FO.

Anyhow, FO has left the purchaser Dean’s phone number. His emergency visit rates are very reasonable.

Libronomicon: Scientists deny the bathtub demon because they can’t think of any way to get publications out of it. This seems… unimaginative.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Phantom pains are usually pains that you feel in an amputated or otherwise nonexistent limb, so I have to ask: in what part of their body, exactly, does Previous Owner get them during those first nightmares? Their tail?

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Sometimes Nightmare Magazine really does live up to its name. I wanted an easy week of real estate horror, and got animal torture instead. My cat Pippin says that if you hold him over a tub screaming, that ain’t compatible with keeping the contents of the tub in their current configuration for long. He also says that cats make better pets than demons. On both these counts he’s one hundred percent right.

If you need a quick pitch for this story, my immediate reaction is Little Shop of Horrors meets The Good Place. I adore both, and feel like the Previous Owner could profitably take lessons from either.

Lesson 1: Never feed the extraterrestrial horror. Not even if it begs. Not even if you can start with something all-but-harmless. Not even if it gets you fame, fortunate and a cute girl. (I’m also pretty sure guinea pig torture isn’t getting Previous Owner any such rewards.)

Lesson 2: The solution to the trolley problem is almost never to accept the basic terms of the trolley problem.

Lesson 3: As long as you’re studying moral philosophy to try and figure out how to deal with the horror, consider inviting the horror to your classes. You never know what it might learn, and it’s unlikely to make the situation worse.

The bathtub demon lacks the singing chops of Audrey II, and likewise the Faustian promises. The best it can do is nudge with nightmares and guilt—I assume the guilt is partly it’s doing, although maybe Previous Owner is just inclined to overthink everything Chidi-style, and thus talk themself into committing atrocities lest they be a bad jailor to the non-Euclidean ponophagic horror from beyond. I’ll admit that I feel guilty if I’m not able to properly feast uninvited guests, but this is taking things a bit far.

Ultimately, though, Previous Owner does take Lesson 2 to heart. The basic terms of the trolley problem are that you’re the one with your hand on the lever, the only person who can make the no-win decision. But we live the era of Buyer Beware and too-long-to-read Terms of Service—why not take the obvious out offered by capitalism? And so we worsen the initial inescapable horror by adding the escape clause of real estate horror.

It’s a ring on the old trope of cursed objects that can only be abandoned by foisting them on others; it’s also a very recognizable fear for any new homeowner. There will always be something: a basement that leaks during storms, a furnace ready to die on the first day of winter, undiscovered lead or radon. And anyone who’s sold a house knows the guilty relief on the flip side: however much you loved that patio, those leaks are someone else’s problem now. Forever, or until they decide what to reveal to the next buyer.

And who knows: maybe that buyer has more than the number of a good plumber and a mediocre priest. Maybe they know where to get plutonium or cursed objects. Maybe they have contact info for Doctor Silence or Doctor Strange, or a Miskatonic library card, or previous experience with exorcisms. Hell, maybe they just moved out of Hill House, and will be grateful to deal with one specific haunt that wants one specific thing.

If your rolodex is lacking, though, you might want to bring through more than one flavor of inspector next time you’re looking at a new house. In the current market, even if it turns out that your choices are an eye-watering imminent furnace replacement versus a haunted bathtub, at least you’ll have some clue what you’re getting into. Caveat emptor, but remember not to feed the horror—no matter how well it sings and/or designs nightmares.

Anne’s Commentary

I wasn’t surprised that Dean immediately identified the cause of FO’s bathroom problem. Plumbers often make excellent paranormal investigators. Look at Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of Ghost Hunters fame, who by day worked as plumbers for Roto-Rooter and by night checked out hauntings in everything from private homes to public buildings, lighthouses, closed-down prisons, and abandoned hospitals. Whether they rolled up to your place in a Roto-Rooter truck or one of their iconic TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) vans, you could rest easy – these guys would soon send your troubles down the drain or back into the afterlife. Come to think, though, if they did think you had a supernatural being in your domicile, they never did boot it out. Mostly they reassured you that ghosts didn’t mean any harm.

Too bad for Lesley’s letter-writer, their supernatural housemate wasn’t benign, what with it being an interdimensional demon that fed on the sufferings of its prey. Trapped in FO’s plumbing, it had no choice but to feed off FO, and if FO wasn’t suffering on their own, never mind, the demon could take care of that.

“Do not call up any that you cannot put down,” one wizard warned another in Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In FO’s case, that would be “Don’t call up any that you cannot flush down,” except they, poor sap, summoned their demon by total accident. How could they have known how perilous it was to install a handheld shower, and then to slip and drop the showerhead, and then to bash one’s nose and get blood on the tiles? In S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, it is written that one can inadvertently summon a Dimensional Shambler by performing three mundane actions in a certain order. Maybe that’s what happened to FO: (1) Install hand-shower; (2) Drop hand-shower; (3) Bleed, as if in sacrificial offering.

Maybe what FO experienced as falling through the world and disintegrating, then coalescing in “ways [their] joints grind to remember” was not them interdimensionally shifting but them entering the demon’s consciousness as it did so. Be that as it may, FO came to in the upstairs bathroom no worse for the trip. No worse physically, that is. The psychic damage already manifested as acute anxiety, and that damage would worsen as the demon’s hungry grip tightened, until FO was driven to actions they found morally abhorrent and emotionally devastating.

To return to the triggering episode in the bathtub. One might wonder (as Father Trevor does) why FO needs a tub hand-shower when they have a standalone shower right across the room. FO retorts that his personal sanitary preferences are hardly relevant. But does Father Trevor know something about the three consecutive mundane actions that can invite demons into one’s plumbing? He might, given that he performs his pastoral duties in or near an area that, as Dean puts it, has “always been a bit thin.”

Now we’re getting to the people who really deserve the blame for FO’s dilemma: Who else, as usual, but greedy real estate developers trying to cut their construction costs! Oh, and the greedy politicians who change building codes to suit the greedy real estate developers, allowing them to install plumbing without adequate transdimensional firewalls! Let’s not forget the commission-hungry realtors who must have known about supernatural happenings in this subdivision—FO isn’t the first to experience one. I asked myself, and Google, whether a seller or his representatives have to disclose to potential buyers that a property is haunted or otherwise paranormally undesirable. This article proved helpful, the gist of it being that sellers and realtors may be legally required to disclose such “emotional defects” as on-site deaths, murders, suicides, or criminal activities but not paranormal activity unless the seller has shared a belief in such activity with “the public at large.” Or unless the potential buyer specifically asks if the property’s haunted, in which case sellers and realtors must tell the truth.

Which truth could only be that sellers and/or their agents and/or the public at large believe in the haunting. I mean, what constitutes legal proof of the paranormal? Unusual local fluctuations in temperature or electromagnetic fields? Photographic or audio recordings of spectral visitations? Witness testimony? Enduring legends?

Could one argue it as proof that only the devil could make FO, presumably a decent person with no prior history of animal abuse, torture animals?

No to all the above, I guess.

Though I’ve roleplayed a few, I’m not a lawyer. My understanding as a layperson and pretty casual researcher is that the doctrine of caveat emptor or buyer beware applies to contract law. FO didn’t beware enough as a buyer. Nor I presume did their own buyer specifically ask about haunts or anomalies. Here’s a big however, however. Say property laws in St. Kilda, New Zealand, do require disclosure of paranormal defects if the seller is shown to believe in said paranormal defects themself. In that case, FO has screwed themself by leaving that letter for the new owner – especially since they admit that the defects may pose significant dangers to occupants, or even to the entire world. Nor do I believe as a LARP-lawyer that there are no public records of property ownership for the outraged letter-recipient to access in preparing their suit against FO for fraud most foul.

As most foul any fraud involving demonically possessed plumbing must be!

Next week, we’re back on the road with an only-slightly-malicious sapient car in chapters 29-30 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.[end-mark]

The post Square House, Door in Front: Kiera Lesley’s “Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom” appeared first on Reactor.

Rereads and Rewatches Max Gladstone

Follow the Yellow Brick Road off a Cliff: Max Gladstone’s Last Exit (Part 14)

You know the mutants were bad, because their leader had tentacles…

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on February 14, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 27-28. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Sarah said things would be bad in the Green Glass City. Aloud Zelda agreed, but she silently hoped that things had worked out.

Sarah was right. The city they left on the mend, mutants exiled, Brigit and her people safe, is empty; its bottle-green skyscrapers have tarnished, and birds and overgrown vegetation are the only living things. Their robot-horses drag the Challenger through deathly silence.

The alt-riders reach the labyrinthine palace at the city’s heart. Wealth and power built it, and generations of graft reaped obscene profit for its officials, until the last mayor fell and mutants replaced its statue heads with busts of their tentacled leader. The humanoid drones that Ish revived to serve Brigit remain, motionless except for their pulsing polymer hearts. There are no bomb-craters, no bloodstains or bones. No signs of rot, either.

Unchallenged, the alt-riders find the palace’s underground garage. To their amazement, it remains perfectly stocked and maintained, no dust or cobwebs anywhere. Ramon expected the job to take two days; uneasy, he decides to do it overnight. Together the alt-riders repair the Challenger  – once again solving the “five-body problem” that is their fellowship.

While the others sleep, Ramon tries to persuade Sarah to accept help warding off the cowboy. Sarah concludes she was wrong to try to exclude June from the fight they’re all in – she chose to be here, and chose again knowing what she was getting into. Back at their sleeping bags, June lies still enough that Sarah suspects she’s only pretending to sleep. Sarah whispers an apology, but a touch reveals that June’s “shoulder” is actually her knapsack, a trick. June is gone.

Determined not to let Sarah face the cowboy alone again, June’s left the garage to search the palace. Her shadows go with her, murmuring. She loses her flashlight in a vast marble hall, but discovers she can see in the dark. The cowboy’s booted footsteps sound on the floor above, but retreat when she challenges him. June pursues, her shadows like sense-extending “whiskers.” He enters a room with no other exit, and she follows. Intense lights blind her. Something covers her face, steals her breath. She falls. And is lifted.

* * *

Sarah’s cry wakes the others. Ish’s knack tells him June’s alive, nearby. He runs into the palace, leading the chase.

June wakes to a room whose walls, ceiling and floor shine with “pitiless artificial sun.” She sits in a metal “chair” made of drones who bind her with their hands. June’s right hand is bleeding, the work of a gaunt, ragged woman who circles into view, swaying as if drunk, holding a glass knife. June looks like Sal, the woman says. Never mind her friends: the would-be rescuers are lost in “the maze.”

June realizes her captor is Brigit, though it’s hard to see the heroic leader in this skeleton. Brigit admits the alt-riders helped defeat the mutants. Then they left, and the shadows grew. They infected her people, urged them to abandon their hard-won safety. There are no shadows in the light-bathed room, June sees. When she tries to call some, Brigit stabs her thigh – she can see the rot in June, having traded her eyes for the metal threads stitched into her empty sockets.

Meanwhile, Zelda and Ish figure out that the rooms they pass and repass are moving. Ramon slashes carpet to reveal a trapdoor. Underneath is a ladder. The alt-riders climb down into what Ish recognizes as the drone control center, brighter-lit than before, with more surveillance cameras. All this “scrutiny” is what’s quelling their knacks.

They find the server room. Someone’s been living there, amid scalpels and pill bottles. On surveillance screens Ish accesses Brigit’s “interrogation room.” Zelda and Sarah go to find it, leaving Ish to turn off the drones immobilizing June.

Brigit rants about her people’s desertion. Finally she found the rot’s source in this room, in that crack in the wall. June sees black appendages struggling out, only to be withered by the caustic light. Brigit wants June to bring her people back; she has become the knife that will cut June until she obeys.

June pretends to try, while silently calling for the shadows, for Sal, to help her. Zelda’s arrival distracts Brigit. Brigit, too, is rot-infected, Zelda says. She has to let go and heal the crack, with Zelda’s help. Instead Brigit says she sees the rot in Zelda and must cut it out. As she attacks, Ish fails to shut down the drones choking June. Ramon cuts the cables that supply coolant and power to the palace-wide systems.

In the interrogation room, the lights go out. Freed from their imprisonment, the shadows kill Brigit. The drones go inert, releasing June. Sarah and a wounded Zelda carry June through smoke-filled darkness as the disabled palace catches fire. The cowboy reappears, but Sarah banishes him again, and the restored Challenger and robot-horses speed the alt-riders from the conflagration.

This Week’s Metrics

What’s Cyclopean: The Green Glass City probably is cyclopean, but the descriptions invoke Oz as much as R’lyeh: bottle-green buildings, moss-colored windshields, emerald mirrors.

The Degenerate Dutch: At Yale Ramon lived in Calhoun College, named after John C. Calhoun (“‘Slavery is a positive good’? That motherfucker?”) It’s since been renamed after Grace Hopper.

Libronomicon: Sarah lists her kids’ favorite books: The Westing Game and the Dog Man series.

Weirdbuilding: You know the mutants were bad, because their leader had tentacles.

Anne’s Commentary

Who could want to see Oz’s Emerald City descend into ruin, while flying monkeys desecrate its once-glittering halls, especially after saving the damn place once already? It’s a shock for the alt-riders to discover their Oz in worse shape than they found it the first time. In apocalyptic times, adventurers expect to encounter lawless gangs, and/or zombies, and/or mutants with or without tentacles. That’s fine, you can fight all of these with sentient muscle cars and might-as-well-be magical knacks. It’s what comes after the ultimate global (or here, civic) smackdown that must devastate: The emptiness and silence that follows the extinction of your species.

In the Green Glass City, colonizing trees and weeds have crowded into the plazas, so they’re not actually empty. Birds still sing and chatter, so silent the city is not. But the people are missing, utterly, having left not even bones behind; for Zelda, that’s what renders the GGC dead. She tells herself she didn’t expect parades. She tells herself she’s always known that bad outcomes were the alt-road default. The crazy thing is that a decade of alt-hopping hasn’t killed her capacity for hope. She acknowledges that they hadn’t left Brigit’s people safe, because there was no “safe.” Mental-seconds later, she’s thinking that “there was still a chance this would all turn out okay.” It’s only momentarily that she can’t “deny the grinding force of history at work,” instead of insisting she’s “a clearly outlined person with wants and goals and needs,” the possession of which implies agency. Or not. There’s also the false agency of the music box monkey, convinced it’s banging those cymbals of its own accord.

Next paragraph, Zelda obliquely compares herself to the cowboy. Would wearing his hat – say, wielding power for power’s sake – feel the way she felt when they reactivated the GGC drones? Do the White Hats have a truer agency, and could theirs last?

Zelda’s a complicated character, all right. Not that any alt-rider’s a simple soul, or else the gravitational force of Zelda’s charisma couldn’t have pulled them in a five-body problem of ridiculous interpersonal complexity. Ramon, however, doesn’t despair of finding a solution to their “astronomical” conundrum. Anecdotal evidence: When the alt-riders have to, they “sort their shit out, cowboys or monsters or rot.” They are all fixers, Ramon of machines, Sarah of bodies, Ish of numbers, Zelda of rot. And June, ally of shadows, fixes things via the rot.

A fix for one player in the cosmic game could break another player, perhaps a requirement for maintaining essential balance. For me, one puzzler Last Exit poses is: Are there absolute good guys and absolute bad guys? Put simply, or perhaps simplistically, are the alt-riders and their allies always Right, while the cowboy and the rot/Beyond-Sal are always Wrong? Initially it looked this way. Granted, Zelda’s always beating herself up for having failed Sal, the alt-riders, the whole of unrotted existence, but that might just be Zelda’s self-doubting way and worthy of sympathy rather than censure.

On the other hand, what about Zelda’s bursts of “clarity” in Chapter 28? What if by groveling in self-condemnation, Zelda had not sought forgiveness but the denial of forgiveness, shifting the spotlight from her victims to herself. As she puts her insight: “Really it was about me the whole time. Like always.” Even during the desperate search for June, she catches herself making “the moment” about Zelda.

Zelda, Zelda, Zelda! If “life was always going to skew in the worst possible way because she was ruined inside and spoiled what she touched,” that meant some inscrutable Power mocked Zelda’s monkey-doll pretenses to autonomy, and “failure was not her fault.” But! If Zelda did have the agency to fail, she might also succeed:  “Then there was still a way. A chance.”

“They have all gone into the world of light!” is the first line of a poem by 17th-century poet Henry Vaughan. Of those she’s lost, Brigit must cry out: “They have all gone into the world of darkness!” The rot has tricked them away, every citizen, every officer and confidant. All her people, the ones she saved with the alt-riders, the ones she tried to save again, alone. All the alt-riders have savior-complexes to one degree or another. Brigit has a savior complex too, but it’s grown pathological, shorn of the heroic and sunk into the egomaniacal. All her people, but culpable for their fate through their ingratitude. Seducible, they were seduced.

Or – they went into the dark because it was beautiful, and they embraced it, as Sal did, as Zelda and June have been tempted to do.

Is it rot that’s driven Brigit mad, as Zelda believes? Will June’s knack for the rot, however useful at the moment, finally corrupt her? All bad, the rot? All good? Like humanity, a mixed bag?

I’ll have the mixed bag of rot for now. You can always pick out the really icky bits and give them to the squirrels. Or maybe not to the squirrels, that could get scary….

Ruthanna’s Commentary

There’s a lot going on in this week’s chapters. Outside the chapters, however, I am dealing with eye trouble: did you know that “stye” is not just a crossword puzzle entry? It’s an annoying-yet-minor condition that requires poking ointment into my eye four times a day. Unfortunately, I have read way too much horror, and scenes with bad things happening to eyes stick with me. Thus, all-too-vivid images rear themselves in my memory every time I go through my care routine. Brigit appears at an inopportune time, and I’m not primed to like her even if she weren’t torturing June with a glass knife. The self-inflicted “fixed” eye sockets, staring hollowly into the void to pin it in place, are more than sufficient. Ow. June, please, please, don’t think about how she did it, and definitely don’t think about whether she used an ice cream scoop.

I’m gonna take a break now and lie down with a warm compress over my eyes. Possibly an armored one.

Brigit started as a hero: a scrappy fighter with bow and arrow, a perfect ally for the college-aged gang who needed a garage to fix their car, and who needed a fixable apocalypse. They helped her fight off tentacled mutants, gave her control over powerful humanoid drones… and left her and her people in a “good place”. Happy endings depend on when you leave the story behind and ride off into the sunset. Brigit’s people didn’t appreciate the good place left for them – maybe because, given any sort of power, she was determined to keep them safe, like it or not. She would exert as much force, as much control, as much close surveillance, as was required to stop them from choosing anything other than safety. And so she’s left with the trinity of pills, knives, and surgical equipment.

Brigit reminds me unfortunately of Ish. Use the all-seeing, certainty-creating machine to hold back the rot, and you end up serving something else. On Earth it’s the cowboy. Brigit may not wear a white hat, though it shows up briefly in her computer system, but she’s sure got something on her head.

“A monster at least had rules,” says June. “A hero didn’t have any.” I’m not sure this is true, but it is often what makes for a facile story of beatable monsters. If you know the lore about vampires you can stake Carmilla sleeping, find the passage in the Necronomicon that lets you stop the ritual, walk the line that keeps you safe in the woods. A good hero has a code, has things she won’t do, principles that see her through the less-than-simple problems. But if you’re a hero just because you’re fighting mutants and have “Disney Princess eyes” (oh god the eyes), you’ve got no brakes. And maybe no tolerance for people who don’t appreciate your obvious heroism.

What kinds of heroes are our alt-riders? Sal certainly didn’t have brakes, nor does Zelda. Ish is all too much like Brigit. Ramon and Sarah, impure and tied to lovers and family, might at least stop and think. But they all want to save the world, and have little patience for the slow mundane work of, say, getting a university to take down celebrations of slavery. And they all love to play the solo martyr; on this count at least June fits right in. Someday these people are going to figure out how to ask for backup before riding out alone – if they all manage it at the same time, they might even find that grail.

Assuming that heroes exist at all: Zelda considers the great man theory versus the cogs of historical force, herself as clockwork monkey atop a music box. If she hadn’t discovered alt-jumping, would someone else have figured it out? The gang and the princess working through the multiverse from opposite sides, just because it was steam engine apocalypse time?

And now they’re riding out again, away from the palace as it finally collapses Usher-style. It’s not quite riding into the sunset, but riding out with your back to the fire is an equally tried-and-true album-cover image: sky the color of new possibilities dawning, or old ones collapsing, or the first night at the college where you’re going to invent interdimensional travel.

Leave a new mess behind you or a tidily-wrapped happy ending: maybe there’s not so much difference after all.

Next week, you’ve just bought a new house, but you used the wrong kind of inspector: buyer beware in Kiera Lesley’s “Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom.”[end-mark]

The post Follow the Yellow Brick Road off a Cliff: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 14) appeared first on Reactor.

Rereads and Rewatches Weird Fiction

The Things We Do For Life Lists: Liz Williams’ “The Hide”

A story set where the natural and unnatural worlds collide.

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on February 7, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we cover Liz Williams’ “The Hide,” first published in Strange Horizons in 2007. You can also find it in The Weird. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Jude has come to the Somerset Levels of southwest England to do research at Moors Centre. The surrounding wetlands were once called the Summer Country, because it was only when the winter floods retreated that the place was dry enough to negotiate. The rest of the year its marshes and groves were “the haunt only of ducks and herons, and the small people who lived along the causeways and in the lake villages.” Jude’s studies center on the Sweet Track, an ancient causeway dated to 3807 BC.

Jude opens on a cold October night. She’s searching the marshes for her sister Clare, accompanied by Clare’s boyfriend Richard. The story starts the summer before, when the three were exploring a bird reserve on the Sweet Track. Clare met Richard through a university bird-watching society, but Jude suspects her enthusiasm centers more on picnics and Richard than birds. Jude wonders what might have happened if Richard had met her before he met Clare. Experience with Clare makes her think that wouldn’t have made a difference.

Clare spots a modern wooden causeway over the reedy marsh. It leads to a bird-watcher’s hide. Clare and Richard duck inside. Near the door Jude finds the wing of a small black bird, recently torn from its owner. Impulsively she sets it on the causeway railing. The hide smells of bird droppings, though Jude sees no sign of rafter nests. Clare lifts an observation hatch, and they spot a heron. Then their focus shifts to three birds gliding over the reedbeds. They appear white, but as they pass the hide, Jude sees that they’re black, long-necked and long-beaked. Probably cormorants?

Back at the car park, they meet a man with a “hippie” van, dreadlocks, and a joint. He asks about their birding luck. They mention the cormorants; oddly, the man’s expression shifts to half-amusement, half—something else. Were these birds black or white? Black, Jude says, adding that you don’t get white ones. Sometimes you do, the man says. And how many were there? Three? Well, he hopes they don’t see them again. Before Jude can question this cryptic remark, he leaves.

Clare and Richard return north. Jude immerses herself in research. Months later, she stops at Clare’s on the way back from a conference. Clare’s out, Richard’s worried. Clare’s been moody since Somerset. Without telling him, she’s taken sick leave from work and spends her days staring into a dirty urban canal. He asks if Clare could visit Jude. Jude feels the brush of feathers against her hands; instead of crying off, she says yes.

Clare arrives in Somerset showing no sign of depression. Over tea, she confides she’s been dreaming about color-shifting cormorants. She seems disappointed when Jude shrugs the dreams off. The next day Clare doesn’t return from a walk. Jude can’t reach Richard but leaves messages. Instead of calling back, Richard arrives in person. He didn’t get Jude’s messages but dreamt about Clare wandering in a storm. In the dream he knows that if she can reach that hide they visited, they can “pull her back.” He dreams of white-then-black birds flying toward Clare: black snow starts falling and covers her. When Richard reaches her, he realizes she’s turned to crumbling peat.

Following the intuition from Richard’s dream, he and Jude go to the hide. In the January-cold October night, mist cloaks the reeds, and Richard moves like one possessed, staring straight ahead. June finds the black wing in her pocket. She’s revolted, but repockets it at Richard’s call. Strange joy suffuses his face. It’s okay, he says: Clare’s here.

Collapsed in the hide? No. Richard points through the open shutters, to a sky dawn-gray in the east, but with a red horizon and storm clouds in the west. Twenty cormorants fly across it, white when east of the hide, black when west of it. A hut on stilts rises opposite the hide, surrounded by black reeds with crimson tips “like ragged bulbs of flesh.” Clare stands on the hut balustrade. A shutter opens behind her, and in the black window Jude sees her own face, but aged and bitter. Hut-Jude waves a bloody bird wing at Hide-Jude. Then the face is no longer hers, no longer human.

Richard wades through the marsh toward the hut. As the last cormorant turns black above, Clare pulls Richard onto the balustrade. In the water, the bird’s white reflection bursts into dazzling splinters, and the hut vanishes, Clare and Richard vanish, leaving Jude alone in the night.

Jude goes home to find Richard and Clare’s things, proof she hasn’t been dreaming. The police search for the couple; the media take notice of the mystery and then drop it. Left alone again, Jude imagines an “ancient conjured hell” whose spirits she could only perceive as birds. Gradually she decides on a simpler explanation. As they went into the hide to “spy” on birds, so “something somewhere else had also set up a hide, to watch us, and when the time was right, to take.”

What’s Cyclopean: The Summer Country is rich with natural details: “gleaming wet marshes, dense beds of dull golden reeds, and groves of alder and unpollarded willow”, the better to contrast with the later, unnatural details.

Libronomicon: Both Clare and Jude had their noses in books as kids, but not the same books: Jude is all about the facts; Clare is about the myths. Jude treats this as a clear distinction, never mind kids who cheerfully alternate between Daulaire’s and National Geographic.

Anne’s Commentary

Why do people make watching birds anything from a casual hobby to a passionate vocation? I mean, why birds in particular? Amphibian and reptile watchers have a special name, but the cultural currency of herpers is so much less than birders that my spell-check always corrects it to herpes. People looking for milk-producing furry things aren’t called mammalers, nor people looking for invertebrates buggers. Here’s what separates birds from other animals: Generally speaking, they’re easier to spot and thus to photograph and add to one’s life list. Birds can be outright  attention hogs—look at the garish dressers like flamingos and parrots and painted-damn-buntings! Listen to the beaks on them, chirping and squawking all day, then hooting all night. The neediest even insist on calling their own names—I’m looking at you, chickadees and whippoorwills.

Another advantage birds have in amassing followers is that they’re the only vertebrates that can fly. I’m not counting the semi-aeronautic gliders or the bats, who are unabashed bird-wannabes. Not that I discount birds who don’t fly: Penguins substitute adorable waddling and mad swimming skills, while ostriches and cassowaries can kick your ass, literally. But flight provides an escape mode the flightless can’t match if birds get any decent head-start. Granted, humans can shoot arrows or bullets, but we’re discussing only benign stalkers. Birds can safely flirt with birders, flaunting their stuff and then simply flitting away.

Sure, some birds don’t like to bask in human adulation. They dress in cryptic colors and hide in the shrubbery, shunning the paparazzi. To observe shyer targets, people need to hide as well. Shrubbery’s not always available; besides, getting into it makes big noise when you’re a clumsy biped. Birders may need to borrow hunting strategy and construct blinds. As Jude puts it, she and her companions use the sanctuary hide to “spy upon the life of birds.” The word spy implies an intentional intrusion on the gazed-upon. It’s fair that the spies should be spied in return. In Williams’ story, something is using birds as bait for its own quarry and has constructed an opposing hide from which to study them.

But—the Something will also take what it observes when the time’s right. When the season turns? When the stars align? When the portal opens between worlds?

Clare may be the sister with the “New Age soul” and an undiscerning appetite for “faux-Arthuriana,” but scientist Jude is not insensitive to the romance of the Levels. Her descriptions of the area are those of a seasoned naturalist and historian; she knows the names of things, which brings her subject landscape to life. Instead of “insects flying through flowers along the path,” she speaks of “damselflies zooming through the kingcups that grew along the margins of the dug-out peat beds.” I was inspired to look up Somerset Levels and Sedgemoor, the Sweet Track and the Moors Centre. They’re actual places in southwest England, just across the Bristol Channel from Wales. Machen celebrated the otherworldliness of the Welsh countryside. Williams brings the weirdness into Somerset.

As grounded in the mundane as Jude’s observations are, they hint at things beyond the immediately perceptible and register a subtle tremor of the strange. Williams opens with a scene that foreshadows the climax while omitting the story’s location or historical period. She then jumps backward in time to Jude’s description of the Levels. With, again, no specific period references, I was half-inclined to think her characters lived in a medieval setting on the cusp of Faery. Look at the place names: The Summer Country, the Sweet Track. Look at how she describes the Iron Age inhabitants: they are “the small people who lived along the causeways and in the lake villages.” “Small” as in fairies or imps?

Williams sets aside this ambiguity midway through a paragraph. Jude, Clare, and Richard turn out to be college-educated moderns. The Moors Centre has a carpark. The local hermit-visionary lives in a motor-van. From the Sweet Track, you can hear distant automobile traffic. You can hear it, that is, until you venture onto the causeway and approach the antechamber between our sphere and Somewhere Else. The hide still provides National Trust information sheets and a common blue heron. But to Jude the heron seems “alien, predatory, as startling as a pterodactyl,” and birds—cormorants?—first look gull-white, then crow-black, all in the space of a veer from light-effect to light-effect, or from reality to reality. Jude has already picked up a severed bird’s wing in ill-omen black. The carpark Merlin hopes they’ll never see those cormorants again. Back home Clare dreams about color-shifting cormorants and skips work to haunt a murky ship canal. Worried, Richard asks Jude to let Clare visit again.

It’s a tough ask for Jude, given she’s attracted to Richard and envies Clare’s relationship. Agreeing, she senses feathers brushing her hands: another ill omen? If so, the third omen comes when Richard and Jude hunt for Clare along the Sweet Track and Jude finds a severed black wing in her pocket. It could be a key to the Otherside, but a reverse one that locks her out instead of admitting her. It’s Clare the Othersiders want, and Clare who is Richard’s ticket in. The face Jude sees in the Other Hide’s window is her own, aged and bitter. It’s the mirror-mask the Othersider wears to mock future Jude, bereft of both sister and love interest.

The second face the Othersider shows is inhuman. I take this as a final hint the creature is Fey, because can any fairy resist getting a final jab in on us mere mortals by showing its true self?

Not in my experience anyhow.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

My birding strategy is to follow actual birders around—mostly my wife—and look where they point. I appreciate birds, but lack the particular sort of attention that lets me track feather color and beak shape and tail length and wing movement and put them all together into recognition, for anything much more challenging than a cardinal. (I am not good at this with humans either.) Birders, though, are constantly scanning for the snatch of song or flash of color that tells them that, if they just look a little closer, they’ll find something remarkable.

It seems like a useful skill for noticing that you’ve slipped out of our familiar reality into something stranger. Useful, and perhaps dangerous. After all, if you keep your head in the clouds or your phone, you might just walk right through violations of natural law none the wiser. The fewer the contents of your awareness, the lower your risk of correlating those contents, right?

Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking illustrates the way that our attention shapes our reality. She takes 11 walks around the same block of New York City: with her dog, her toddler, an entomologist, an expert in the relationship between gait and health, et cetera. Some walks are long and some brief, some draw meaning from passers-by or buildings and others from cracks in the sidewalk or bits of trash. Bits of world appear and vanish like magic. Or like the Summer Country, ostensibly revealed by seasonally retreating waters but named like a Brigadoon, a Faerie, that only touches our world on special occasions.

Clare’s “New Age soul” seeks the numinous. Unfortunately for her, what’s out there to be revealed is no Camelot. Or so we assume. It doesn’t feel like a Camelot. But those of us who stay behind the Hide slats get only a glimpse. My first thought is some archetypal savage past, like the little house in Benson’s “Between the Lights”. But then there’s Jude’s face, older and bitter, peering from the house—so not exactly the past. Unless we’re in Charles Dexter Ward territory, made vulnerable by similarity to unpleasant ancestors. More likely, perhaps, some sort of mirror universe doppelgangers—or the extradimensional birdwatchers and birdhunters that Jude imagines, using mimicry as one of their less effective techniques.

Or maybe that really is Avalon over there, apple-groved Isle of the Dead. That would certainly be the best option.

One way or another, poor Jude is stuck in one of Clare’s books of myth, far from the realm of facts about peat bog archaeology. Even beyond the disappearance of her inconvenient crush object and her sister-rival, this is not a situation likely to submit to explanation. The color-shifting birds, the black wing still fresh with gore, the draw of the canal, Clare’s dreams and Richard’s, the Hide itself—the numinous is too close to avoid regardless of how carefully you keep your head down.

Peat bogs are liminal spaces even when not cut off by water three seasons of the year. They preserve bodies and nurture new growth. Life and death, growth and decay, change and stasis. They’re natural, but they don’t necessarily feel that way. The initial description walks that line, making the area “the haunt” of ducks and herons and lake villagers. Birds are natural, right? Just ask Du Maurier. Or ask Blackwood how quickly the natural can blur into the super-natural.

I haven’t asked my wife yet how to ID birds that shift color depending on viewing angle, or how to safely handle their feathers. Maybe I should. For now, I think, I’m going to stick to watching chickadees at our winter feeder, and go inside if they show a taste for anything other than birdseed.

Next week, there are probably more disturbing revelations in chapters 27-28 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit. [end-mark]

The post The Things We Do For Life Lists: Liz Williams’ “The Hide” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 23-24. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Zelda wakes up after her ordeal in the Medicine Wheel. Someone—Ramon—says her name, and yes, she’s Zelda still, ten years after losing Sal. Instead of lying beside the Wheel, she lies under a sod roof. Ramon watches her not with the scorn she expects, but with sad kindness. “I was wrong to send the letters,” she tells him. “You don’t owe me anything.” He answers: “We’re not here because we owe you.”

“We” includes June, who rushes in to hug Zelda, and Ish and Sarah. They’ve made it through the alts, robot horses towing the Challenger. Ish and Sarah echo Ramon: They have to fix this. But they reject Zelda’s suggestion that together, they can make the Wheel work. Staggering outside, Zelda sees why.

The cracks in the sky have plunged down into the alt-earth; widening cracks devour the stars and fracture the moon. Within is “a black hole in the shape of a woman taller than mountains.” The Wheel is gone, sucked into whatever lies beyond the cracks. Is everywhere like this, Zelda asks. Is home?

No way to know, because they can no longer get back. The best they can do now is go to the Green Glass City where “Brigit’s people” can help repair the Challenger. From there, they’ll continue to Elsinore. When June asks the same question that’s on the reader’s mind, Zelda remembers the princess dead, the queen falling “from rot-soaked battlements. “It’s the place where everything went wrong,” she says. “It’s where I lost her.”

Later that night, Zelda finds June out alone, “wrapped in shadows that wriggled like snakes.” June asks if Zelda’s afraid of her, but Zelda says June’s shadows are different. She describes finding the old Sal in the Wheel and they lean together, June’s shadows parting to allow it.

But the question Zelda senses in June’s tension goes unasked, its moment passing.

* * *

As the alt-riders inch east, Sarah thinks: This is “the road to the end.” Not that she believes in premonitions, but she always knew what Zelda’s summons meant: They left a task undone, and to protect the life she made afterwards, Sarah has to finish it. She wishes she’d told her children the truth of the world instead of keeping their memories as pain-free as possible.

Always one to plan ahead, she reviews her partners—and herself—like surgical tools before an operation. She’s good at traveling rough and protecting her friends. Ramon tinkers at the Challenger to figure out what will need repairing in the Green Glass City. Ish has the courage to fight on, not with ignorant optimism but with the conviction that they can do better in future quests despite “his own gimlet vision of just how fucked things really were.” But he’s lost his youthful softness: under the edgy steel he’s become, is that Ish still there?

As for Zelda, “haunted…unwhole”, is she still strong enough for the road?

Sarah checks in: Zelda knows the City will be bad, right? Zelda hopes not—they left it in a good place, well-supplied, mutants driven off.  But, Sarah argues, look how life’s seeping out of the alts. Her tension exploding , Zelda shouts: What choice do they have? They’ll get through this, they have time.

Not much time, Sarah says. The cowboy’s still after them, closing fast. Sarah can hear him. When she leaves Zelda, she looks back and sees June hiding behind a rock, listening.

Sarah’s been hearing the cowboy’s booted footsteps since they left the Wheel. She’s thrown her spin against him with no lasting effect. June offers to help ward the cowboy off. Sarah’s been thinking of early days at college, when she felt adrift, an alien, with a roommate off in her own world. One night, drunk, she met Sal; on their way home, they clicked, two outsiders, soon closest friends. June might look like Sal, but she isn’t Sal. And maybe they should’ve kept Sal safer. Sarah turns down June’s help.

One day, riding with Ramon, June asks about Elsinore. He describes the Green Glass City instead, then relents. Elsinore’s a “postapocalyptic feudal” place, with castles and knights on motorback. Its princess knew her world was dying. She studied, and looked for the crossroads. After failing at the Wheel on her own, she enlisted the alt-riders’ help. Together they zeroed in on the crossroads, but the queen cursed them and called down the rot. The princess died. While escaping, Sal and Zelda saw the crossroads and tried to get there. Disaster.

June tells Ramon about Sarah’s struggles with the cowboy. Ramon agrees to talk to her, and try to get her to accept help. June also passes on Sarah’s worries about the Green Glass City. Ramon says they’ve been through a lot—it’s not too much, is it, to hope the City will be the one thing that breaks their way?

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Cowboy: Trees and cardiovascular research are not the most dramatic-sounding combination. And yet.

What’s Cyclopean: Sarah imagines the Cowboy as “a man waiting for a bird to roast, so caught by the visions the smell excites – crisp glistening skin, yielding meat, the juice inside—that when the call comes to dinner, he turns reluctantly from the bird in his mind to the bird on the table. But he comes to the table all the same.” Now, there’s an uncomfortable metaphor.

Libronomicon: Sarah thinks of Ish’s “softness” as a sword-wielding mouse from the Redwall series, and wonders if the heroic mouse still survives.

Weirdbuilding: The gang at Elsinore found spells and tricks, had their Wheel-walking apparatus all set up—they were just “waiting for the stars to be right.” Kinda makes you wonder… if you need to wait until the stars come right, what exactly do you think you’re summoning?

Ruthanna’s Commentary

When my godson was five or so, I took him to the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center, where the Air and Space Museum keeps vehicles. He enjoyed running around looking at planes, and of course the highlight was the Discovery Space Shuttle. It’s not the only thing in that hanger: if you walk around near the tail, you’ll find yourself face-to-face with a collection of rockets including an ICBM missile. And your godson will ask, “What’s that one?”

I sympathize with Sarah, is what I’m saying.

It’s telling, however, that her carefully-constructed bubble of safety requires protection from knowledge as well as from actual danger. Because I did, in fact, have the age-appropriate nuclear war talk with my godson, as my parents did with me during the actual Cold War. I have talked to my kids about climate change, fascism, genocide, and several flavors of bigotry. I’ve also talked to them about protests, writing letters, mutual aid, and how to hide people in your attic when appropriate. Because if you don’t talk about the bad stuff, you can’t talk about how to fight back – and so Sarah has been not talking about how to fight back for ten years. People raised in an illusion would generally rather retreat back into lies than do the hard, dirty work required to gain for-real what they thought they already had – just ask the Cowboy.

Or don’t, because Sarah’s managing to keep him at a distance, for now. Which is good, and would be better if she weren’t insisting, Zelda-style, on doing it as a solo martyr. How do these people, who’ve been through so much together, come to be this resistant to working together? That’s a rhetorical question, but also—you can’t claim with one side of your mouth that the world is ending for everyone, and with the other that you’re keeping June safe by rejecting her contributions to saving the world. “Everyone” includes the gang. No exceptions for youth, inexperience, or nerve-wracking knacks.

At least we’re finally learning about Elsinore—which also turns out to be nerve-wracking. The Princess was a scientist, someone on the same mission as the gang and willing to team up to turn the Wheel. This raises the question again of the reality level of the alts. If they’re all nightmares from our world, you wouldn’t expect them to try and save themselves – and one of the consistencies of the gang’s old stories is that What These People Need is a Yalie. The Green Glass City is a prime example, all mind-control worms and mutants until the alt-riders appeared. Elsinore is different, not because it’s where “everything went wrong” but because it’s another locus of agency. The Princess not only wants to save the world, she’s an alt-rider in her own right.

Or was that an illusion? Did it “go wrong” because that was Elsinore’s particular nightmare? Subtler than mind-control worms it may be, but betrayal by those closest to you can feel pretty apocalyptic. What pushed the queen to undermine their work? What pulled the crossroads to them, only to tempt Sal into the rot? Did they name it for Hamlet’s tragedy-stage afterward, or did it come with that ill-omened name from the start? Maybe events played out with the force of nightmare narrative, or maybe it was mundane local politics – or maybe the same thing that’s trying to undermine their work now, one bullet at a time. More questions than we had about Elsinore before, and more interesting ones.

The major change this week, however, is the loss of access to their home dimension. Maybe Sal’s in the way, or maybe the Cowboy—either way, they can only go forward now. Can only have faith that there’s something to return to. It does feel of a piece with how the Princess de-centers the gang. Maybe our world isn’t the One True Reality that dreams the others into already-dying existence. Maybe it’s someone else’s nightmare, as fragile as any other illusion. Or maybe all the worlds are in this together, and there are more riders converging, each still convinced that survival depends on their solo heroism.

About that rhetorical question.

Anne’s Commentary

I was hoping after Chapter 24, what with the princess appearing in incandescent white glory, that Zelda’s flashback would continue into Chapter 25 and deliver the Elsinore backstory complete. Nope. Max Gladstone is like the flirtatious elf Snowball in David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries. Max Gladstone leads readers on. Readers and Santas—I mean, readers and bloggers. Admittedly, Zelda discloses that the princess dies, and Ramon tells June that Elsinore is postapocalyptic feudal-core, down to the ladies’ cone-shaped hats. Ramon also pins the demise of both the princess and the alt-riders’ crossroads plans on Elsinore’s queen. A teaser here, a spoiler there, a great preview clip of the castle walls growing arms and mouths and eating people from the inside out. Elsinore: Where everything went wrong. Where Zelda lost Sal.

Moreover, we can’t go on to Elsinore in present story time until we’ve made a pit stop in the Green Glass City (GGC). Evidently, the GGC has a rad body shop where Ramon can repair the Challenger. It used to have mutants and may have them again if Sarah’s Cassandra-knack is right. Mutants are always worth a side trip. Besides, you’ve got to have a sentient muscle car if you want to cruise the cross-reality road in style.

The alt-riders have no option but to cruise on—their GO HOME game option seems to have expired. That’s if alt-riding ever was a game rather than an infectious compulsion to find the Eden-Alt, with Zelda as the index case.

Three-quarters of the way through Last Exit, I find my Character Sympathy Scale shifting. From the start, I disliked Zelda’s penchant for self-flagellation, but, girl, surely you’ve worn your cat o’ nine tails out! You were a brilliant if cosmically naive kid back in your college days. Fatally, you had the charisma to win other brilliant kids over to your crazy ideas, including Sal, who had the charisma squared to back you up. I can’t blame you for being seduced by the magic of spin. Given the dynamics of the alt-riders, the rest probably had to follow. The Yellow Brick Road goes forever on and on, and you must follow if you can.

That allowed, I wish you’d pull that whip out of your pack and chuck it into the perishing shrubbery. When you flail at yourself, you can hit the people around you, making them collateral damage to your guilt and, yes, to your self-pity. The first thing you do after waking from your post-Wheel stupor is to search Ramon’s face for the “scorn, pity, frustration” that you need to find there, confirmation your self-hatred is deserved rather than pathological.

It’s too late for Zelda to tell Ramon (yet again) she was wrong to send her letters, that he and the others owe her nothing. Ramon’s response demonstrates growing insight: “We’re not here because we owe you.” This isn’t the Zelda Show; what’s happening to the worlds is not all about her. Wheel-Sal has already told Zelda they’re in this together. “We’re with you all the way,” Ish says. Sarah adds “We have to fix this.”

The OG alt-riders haven’t come back to atone for deserting Zelda ten years before. Nor are they and June there as mere sidekicks. They can figure things out and make plans even when Zelda’s knocked out. They’ve come to save their own particular people and places. When Zelda slips back into telling Sarah that she shouldn’t have rejoined the quest because of her kids, Sarah’s answer is incontrovertible: “If the world ends, it ends for them too.” And who can argue that the end isn’t near, with sky and earth cracking in tandem and Beyond-Sal hovering ever visible?

Zelda’s drop on my Sympathy Scale may recover. She may hope things will end in her reunion with the unchanged Wheel-Sal; far more probable seems a confrontation with Beyond-Sal. Can she handle that and stay on mission? Zelda thinks she can, which is too weak an answer for Sarah, maybe rightly so in a cosmos where possibilities become realities through the magic of will or belief or faith, whatever powers spin.

June has been rising steadily on the Sympathy Scale and continues to do so in Chapters 25 and 26. Burdened by her new Rot-summoning knack, she can still ask Zelda whether this knack makes her Zelda’s enemy. She can empathize with Sarah, who’s expending a debilitating amount of energy to protect them from the cowboy. Sarah rises on the Scale through her strength and determination and the keen insight that can perceive Ish as all the more heroic because he may still be like a Redwall mouse: “goofy, brave, idealistic against all evidence.”

Her understanding of Ish pushes him higher on my Scale. Ramon has never slipped from an initial high rating.

Zelda can rise again. Much depends on whether she can toss that whip, or at least wield it against maybe-insurgent GGC mutants rather than herself.

Next week, Liz Williams’s “The Hide” seems like a nice cautionary tale against birdwatching. You can find it in The Weird.[end-mark]

The post Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In’t: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 13) appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we cover Nadia Bulkin’s “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” first published in Aickman’s Heirs in 2015—you can find it most easily in Nick Mamatas’s Wonder and Glory Forever anthology. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Amanda lives in Hartbury, one of two towns on Mt. Halberk. The other, Manfield, is a ghost town whose steeple, water tower and municipal dome peek above the trees when you drive down Highway 51. A long time ago, there was an accident at Manfield’s chemical factory which released a cloud of pesticide gas, killing all its inhabitants. Amanda won’t learn this story until junior high—young Amanda imagines God crying “away with you sinners” and waking extinct Mt. Halberk to exact His vengeance. A “morbid” child, she soothes her anxieties by drawing pictures of Manfield complete with stick-figure people and animals. Then she draws the volcano pouring black Sharpie curlicues of destruction down on the town. On Manfield—not on Hartbury, not on her.

Amanda’s friend Jennifer is afraid of ice cream trucks. Amanda’s phobia is less whimsical: She’s afraid of skeletons, because they make her think about “what waited for [her] on the other side.” Pastor Joel tells her that Heaven will hold no ugliness or suffering, and besides, it will be a long time before she’s ready to go. Well and good, but his reassurances can’t banish the under-the-bed skeleton that emerges to clamp rotten fingerbones around her neck. It takes her teacher Miss Lucy to exorcize the nightmares, Miss Lucy so loves Halloween that she hangs a skeleton decal from the classroom American flag. She tells Amanda that she shouldn’t fear skeletons, given she already has one inside her. Parents don’t like Miss Lucy. She’s replaced by Mrs. Joan, who doesn’t like Halloween.

At seventeen, Amanda makes her first visit to Manfield with friends—a “hardcore” way to celebrate Halloween. Their vision of an Old West ghost town is far from the truth. With its “ticky-tacky houses and plastic lawn gnomes and busted minivans,” Manfield looks “just like Hartbury—only dead.” Allie’s surprised to see that the newspaper clippings taped in a tavern window are only twelve years old. Parents have been vague about the chronological distance of the disaster, stating it was “a while ago.” “A while,” Amanda thinks, is one of those “slipshod words that you could rearrange to cover up the fact that somewhere, somebody was wrong.”

Amanda goes out of town to college, where her most critical lesson comes from an anthropology-obsessed roommate, who’s reading a book called A History of Forgotten Christianity. One chapter’s on cults of universal resurrection. Around 350 such communities sprouted in Northeastern America, mostly in small towns subject to high mortality rates. The cultists believed God had granted them the power to raise the dead. Pastors and elders could perform a ritual immediately postmortem to prevent the soul from leaving. Two details chill Amanda. The cult’s symbol was the scarab beetle, whose offspring emerge from balls of dung—like the stained-glass windows in her home church. And most universal resurrection cults eventually converted to mainstream Christianity. Most, but not all.

Amanda leaves college and goes to the city. She’s known that the toxic cloud that destroyed Manfield did blow toward Hartbury; she’s assumed it never got there. Now she’s convinced Hartbury’s home to the walking dead. She estranges herself from her family and substitutes for them “Brother Whiskey and Sister Vodka.”

At twenty-three, she returns home for her aunt’s funeral. Her parents are frightened by the tattoos of bones she wears by way of memento mori. They’re appalled when she reacts with hysterical terror and laughter to Pastor Joel’s funeral oration: O death where is thy sting? Her father accuses her of having no respect for the life her town’s given her, while she counters he has no respect for death. Why doesn’t he bring Aunt Ruth back to life if he loves it so much? Her father answers that Aunt Ruth was ready to go. Ready this time.

Amanda returns to Manfield, alone except for the family dog Buttons. The ghost town looks more dilapidated now, but she follows a new group of thrill-seeking teenagers. One guy mentions the neighboring town that also got gassed but survived. His mother was a 911 operator who got a flood of calls from Hartbury. When rescue workers arrived, they were told everyone was fine.

Amanda roams again, through a world succumbing to plagues and war and martial law. She gets sober but keeps moving. On a bus trip in “the dead of summer,” her own skeleton returns to her, “its agony…so much deeper, that much richer…grown up.” She tells a fellow passenger, an old man with rotting teeth, about Hartbury and confides a secret: She died there. He grins and says, “Join the club, living dead girl.”

On her third visit to Manfield, Amanda finds nature reclaiming it. But still there are thrill-seeking teenagers. She hides and eavesdrops. One recounts a story from a friend-of-a-friend: the town’s haunted by a girl with a dog. So Buttons is going to live forever, unlike the FOAF who was deployed and died. “Everyone was dead,” Amanda concludes. “Everyone was alive.” And a fighter jet roars overhead, “on time for its appointment with the grim reaper.”

Libronomicon: Narrator’s college roommate quotes to her from A History of Forgotten Christianity, sharing unwanted information about the sect in which she grew up (or went through some semblance of growing up).

Madness Takes Its Toll: The narrator describes herself growing “older and madder”; it’s entirely unclear which meaning of “mad” she intends.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

The world is off its track. Something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen, or something didn’t happen that was supposed to. And with one thing off-track, everything goes sideways and keeps going, stranger and stranger and worse and worse, a katamari damarcy runaway trolley of wrongness. It is, maybe, a familiar feeling.

Nadia Bulkin is a long-time Reading the Weird favorite—this is the least bloody of her pieces we’ve covered so far, and also maybe the creepiest.

I read a story in my teens—here it is, wow, I didn’t expect to find it!—in which a man is given a book by a street preacher entitled You Will Never Die. The book’s message is not so hopeful as one might presume from the title: it suggests that in a multiverse of infinite possibilities, where new realities split off with each decision and dice roll, every individual consciousness will follow the track of possibility in which its existence continues. If you get hit by a runaway trolley, you’ll wake in a world where the trolley was sideswiped by a bus just before it hit you, saving your life and destroying others. The longer your consciousness goes on, of course, the stranger and more unlikely the world around you becomes—depending, as it does, on the increasingly wild events required for your personal survival. The narrator ends up the last survivor of Earth, being “salvaged” by aliens via…maybe you should just go read, I’m not sure I can adequately summarize it. It’s all very unpleasant and exactly as strange as you’d expect from Robert Charles Wilson.

“Seven Minutes in Heaven” feels of a piece with that story. Something is off-kilter right at the beginning, and the world gets worse and stranger as it goes. It’s never quite labeled as an alternate history—but the narrator’s survival requires Christ the Worm and Christ the Scarab, requires resurrectionist priests and a seven minute refund period on death. Perhaps it also required the Pacific Wars and broken highways, survivors of some further unspecified war murdering each other beside buses. I’m reminded again of another story, this time Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, where a therapist manipulates a patient who can dream changes into reality, trying to make the world better and succeeding only in painting humanity into ever-worse corners.

Which brings us back to Last Exit, and the question of whether a better reality is findable, and if so what it takes to get there from a local maxima surrounded by chasms of dystopia.

I don’t think the narrator of this story is going to get past those chasms, somehow. If half-life can be pulled from death, then life grows increasingly meaningless, and decisions (perhaps to go to war and launch angelic war planes) become increasingly made by the half-alive who refuse to acknowledge what they’ve done. The resurrection of Hartbury might have gone very differently if not accompanied by the insistence that everything is fine, that Mansfield died decades ago, that history was never different and couldn’t ever have been different. Lies, like violations of natural law, multiply and run out of control, until truth and lie—like life and death—can no longer be distinguished, and one can’t be preferred over the other.

One subtle horror, among the many obvious ones, is how the resurrected Hartburians lose the solace of irrational phobia. In our world, a child with nightmares about skeletons or the sea can be reassured that dreams aren’t real and fear can attach to anything. But here’s poor Jennifer Trudeau and her freak ice cream truck accident—perhaps waking in a worse and stranger reality with her head attached to an alien robot? Or her brain in a jar on its way past Yuggoth?

That may be the worst possibility. In a world where “everyone was dead; everyone was alive,” there’s no particular expectation that well-meaning priests—even ones capable of mass resurrection—are right about the other options at the end of that seven-minute waiting period. The narrator recalls only darkness in her memento mori. Maybe there’s no heaven for the solidly dead after all. Maybe there are just increasingly fractional states of living, in ever-increasing states of uncertainty, far from the track where the world started.

Anne’s Commentary

I can sympathize with Amanda’s compulsion to draw pictures of Manfield and its volcanic destruction. Putting the tormenting image down on paper is the only way she can get it out of her head and remind herself it was Manfield that incurred the wrath of God, not Hartbury. When I was in early grade school, I overheard my mother talking about some kid who got lookeemia and died. My takeaway was that kids were especially susceptible to lookeemia and always died from it. Always, because what it was, your heart was normally half-red and half-white, but sometimes the white half started eating the red half until the heart was all white, and then forget about it, the worms would soon be crawling in and out, like the song said. I’d barely gotten over thinking I’d get leprosy like guys in Bible stories and have to totter around noseless with a bell around my neck. Now I drew page after page of cartoons in which normal hearts went lethally bleached. The last frame was a skull with X’s instead of eye sockets.

Not that I was a morbid child or anything. I was quite cheerful after drawing the hearts, because it was never my heart in the cartoon but that of some kid too dumb to ward off lookeemia via the magic of art.

I had to look up this Seven Minutes in Heaven game. Also the concept that it takes seven minutes for the soul to journey to paradise. Eventually Amanda learns that the name doesn’t refer to a variation of freeze-tag, but to a party game popular with teens. In the party game, two of the players go together into a closet or similar tight, dark space and stay there for seven minutes, chatting or kissing or making out, name your level of intimacy. Being an inveterate eavesdropper, Amanda might have heard some teens talking about Seven Minutes; caught, they might have come up with the freeze-tag story. Or she might have asked adults about the game, and gotten the embarrassed fib. Those who were adults when the Manfield factory belched death are used to telling face- and/or sanity-saving lies to their children.

The truth was that Manfield’s wind-wafted poison-cloud entered Hartbury attenuated enough not to kill everyone before Parson Joel and associates had time to revivify the stricken. I bet the Manfield people used to shake their heads about those scarab-worshiping Hartbury folk, but the cosmic laugh was on them when the Universal Resurrectionists had just the right disaster plan in place.

Or… did they?

In addition to discovering the true nature of the Seven Minutes game, Amanda realizes that seven minutes isn’t the length of time it takes for a soul to reach heaven. I tried to figure out where she got this notion. Unsurprisingly, I could track down no consensus on the theological question. Some suppose the soul transitions to the afterlife at death. Others suppose the soul remains in a transitional state for varying lengths of time, like the forty-nine days Tibetan Buddhists believe a soul lingers in the bardo before rebirth. Some Biblical passages contend that nobody goes to heaven instantly, but must “sleep” until the Second Coming, as in John 5: 28-29:

In 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-15, Paul tells the dozing dead not to worry that the wide-awake will beat them to the Throne of Judgment: “We who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep.”

This may reassure most of us, but what about those resurrected not by divine trumpets but by potentially criminal necromancy? Pastor Joel, I’m looking at you. I’m sure you meant well, but in legend and weird fiction, usurping godly powers rarely ends well. Can living dead girls hope to join the existentially pure on the Last Day? Is their only salvation finally choosing to die and stay dead, like Aunt Rose? Bulkin doesn’t say, but are the Universally Resurrected immortal? Amanda evades many mortal perils in the apocalyptic times of her maturity: plague, war, people who’ll kill you for the stale Kind Bars in your backpack.

To consider Amanda’s situation from a more philosophical, perhaps ecological standpoint: Can one respect life without respecting death? This is an argument Amanda has with her father when he accuses her of not valuing what Universal Resurrection has given her.

Amanda has plenty of memento mori, “the shadows of nearly all [her] bones…tattooed across [her] body.” She, however, doesn’t have to remember she must die—she already has died, as she tells the old man on the bus. He says to join the club, which probably doesn’t mean he’s also Universally Resurrected, although that would be cool. Everyone is dead, everyone is alive. That’s the epiphany Amanda takes away from her last visit to Manfield.

In the midst of life, we are in death. Figuratively true for all. Actually true for Amanda. Is it any wonder if she’s a bit morbid?

Next week, maybe we finally learn about Elsinore? Maybe, in chapters 25-26 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit. [end-mark]

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This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 23-24. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

The first time Zelda followed Sal into the Medicine Wheel, she didn’t believe Sal’s contention that the place felt “completely normal.” Now Zelda understands. Though from inside the Wheel seems to stretch on forever—wouldn’t it be stranger not to see everything, not to be able to “greet every being face to face and name it in its own tongue”? Above her, the sky births stars, golden webs, three moons “full, new, gravid, and gone.”

She’s larger here, unfolded. Her strides cross leagues, and she soon approaches the Wheel’s center and the fixed light of the northern Bear. Vertigo-sickened, she stares down “a pit four hundred and thirty light years deep” to a tri-star system. Another step plunges her into storm: a rage of wind, lightning and thunder, music and whale-shapes surging through the dark. Once she thought the storm came from outside, from the rot. Instead the storm lives here, as if “the weight of so much spin, of so many different worlds and might-have-beens, created this vortex.”

Ten years before, a voice on the Wheel-wind asked “What do you seek?” Zelda answered, for “it to be okay.” The answer: “Child, it never is.” Still, she reached Sal and dragged her from the Wheel nearly frozen, arm shredded as if by a barbed-wire hand. Ten years later she turns her spin against the storm of “grief, hunger, blame,” and her skin is too scar-armored for the storm to defeat her. Show me the way, she demands, and—the storm stops, so abruptly that she falls.

A hand reaches toward her—Sal sits in the eye of the storm, not the sky-tall fire-and-shadow Sal but “Sal, before she was lost. Sal, before Zelda failed.” Zelda struggles to figure out how this can be and how to say something that won’t mess things up. Sal speaks Zelda’s name, and they simply embrace.

Everything Zelda’s reading about time travel tells her it’s dangerous to answer Sal’s: “How long?” She answers anyway. “Am I…” Sal asks. Is she dead? No, Zelda says, as she’s always insisted.

Zelda got scared, Sal says. But everyone gets scared, including the Sal Zelda thought so fearless. Zelda’s impulse now is to tell Sal to leave and never think of her again. Instead she tells Sal that she never stopped loving her. Sal replies that she loves Zelda. They’re in this together, and Sal won’t let go if Zelda doesn’t.

It’s not our choice, Zelda wants to say. Out there is a great hungry darkness, and love won’t “blunt its teeth.”

“I’m scared right now,” Sal says. And why not, with the eye of the storm closing in. Zelda clings to Sal, silently begging the moment to be forever, for them not to have to face what comes next, ten years back. Don’t let Zelda fail, don’t let Sal change, let them stay together, holding each other.

* * *

Ramon wakes to a storm that shakes the Challenger. Zelda should have warned him it was coming, but she always meant to enter the Wheel alone, didn’t she? The Challenger responds I told you so. Ramon can’t trust anyone out here, it insists, and he’d rather have his cozy life back home than the truth. Zelda knows he’s not fit to follow her. Does he think he can help her now, struggling in the tempest inside the Wheel? No, says the Challenger: “she wins or dies. That’s America.”

Nevertheless, he struggles into the Wheel and lets his knack lead him one step at a time to Zelda. He had faith once in his power to fix things. He had faith Zelda would always know what to do. Now he believes if there’s a cosmic design, only a “vast and utterly alien consciousness” could apprehend it. That said, there’s some gravity to it all that led them together by the intent of will, care, love.

He finds Zelda and carries her out along a stone-delineated spoke. Emerging from the Wheel, he steps into dawnlight. The sky’s clear, the Challenger half-covered in drifted sand. Three riders approach on dead horses: two women and, unmistakable, “the bulk of Ish.”

* * *

Ten years before, after Zelda pulled Sal from the Medicine Wheel, they huddled in one sleeping bag, Zelda desperate to warm her lover. Sal was like ice, but even asleep she smiled, happy. Zelda lay awake, wondering if their capital-Q Quest would ever lead to an end: the treasure, the grail. The crossroads was still far away, if it existed at all outside their needs and desires.

The night silence was broken by the jingling of silver bells, too melodious to belong in the rotting alts. Zelda looked toward their ashed-over campfire where the air twisted as if someone was hitching in. What appeared was a woman in white on a white horse. The woman was about Zelda’s age, and she fixed on Zelda a wise, gentle smile.

“Do not be afraid,” she said. “Long have I sought you, and we have much to do.”

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Cowboy: Continued creation of Terra Preta in the Amazon. If you don’t know about Terra Preta, you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000!

Libronomicon: Is there advice to the reader in Zelda’s wish to pause time with Sal alive “like a sentence is when you close the book and put it down and never read the next”?

Weirdbuilding: Zelda may be genre-savvy about time travel, but that doesn’t make her behave any differently when talking to Younger Sal.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Zelda has faced the cracks in the world before, and “the madness there.” So she’s very sure she can make her way through the storm within the wheel, and make it “bow to her.” I’m not sure that’s how any of this works.

Anne’s Commentary

In Chapter 23, Ramon confronts home truths about the human intellect’s limitations in grasping the core nature of the cosmos, its “logic or justice”:

I tried to type fast enough to record my insights from our first trip inside the Medicine Wheel, which epiphanies lasted for roughly five microseconds—I’m no higher (or even lower) mathematician. Nor am I a vast wrong-angled consciousness, fun though that might be. But since I did type down my impressions, I include them below.

Is the Wheel singular but omnipresent across all worlds by some trick of the altiverse, or is it plural, each world/alt having its own Wheel? Or is the Wheel neither singular nor plural but both?

Say there’s One Wheel to Rule Them All, if ruling is what the Wheel even does. We could think of an omnipresent Wheel as having a site-specific iteration in each alt. I first visualized an infinitely expansive Sphere. Its interior holds the One True Reality (OTR). On its surface, percolated from the OTR, are an infinite number of bubbles or buds, each a discrete world/alt/possibility. All buds remain connected to the Sphere and communicate with the OTR interior.

Or to stick with the Wheel metaphor. Picture an infinitely large wagon wheel, with an infinite number of spokes radiating from the central hub to the outer rim. The hub would represent the One True Reality, the rim (like the surface of the Sphere) an interface with the Not-Cosmos (see below.) The spokes, then, are analogous to the Sphere buds, site-specific iterations of the OTR, one per world/alt/possibility. All the spokes connect to and communicate with the OTR hub.

Beyond the surface of the Sphere or the rim of the Wheel is the Not-Cosmos, call it a second OTR. This would be the Outside, the Realm of Rot—maybe the home of that utterly alien consciousness Ramon supposes capable of apprehending the design of it all. As it’s in contact with Sphere-Skin and Wheel-Rim, the Outside can infect their bud/spoke iterations; via these iterations, the Outside could conceivably infect the Sphere-Interior and Wheel-Hub. Which would suck.

Or would it? We’re not sure the Outside is Totally Evil. In the end, Sal experienced it as ecstatic revelation….

Maybe I didn’t type fast enough after all, because I bogged down in confuddlement at this point.  What are Zelda’s impressions of the internal anatomy of the Wheel? First, that its interior is as big as the world. Second, that her vision expands not only to encompass its expanse but to see every being in it. Third, that she herself expands as if bursting free from a larval shell. It’s a euphoric experience until she nears the center of the Wheel. There a “pit” descends light years to a triple-star system—the actual location of the alt where she and Ramon are camped, or of the alt she needs to find? Her sense of normality becomes a crushing sense of alienation, and she plunges into storm.

She used to think the storm came from outside the Wheel. Now she realizes the storm “lives” in the Wheel, a vortex manifested from all the grief and spent spin of ruined worlds. With the road-scars accumulated over ten years, Zelda’s sufficiently armored to fight through the storm to the very center of the Wheel.

The Wheel, she’s believed, is the same in every alt, every point of time. This trip in, she leaps to a new comprehension of the Wheel as infinitely layered. Other worlds exist within the storm-vortex, but they’re “written” in languages she doesn’t know, scribbles without meaning.

The language that she can read, the heart of Zelda’s Wheel, is Sal—unchanged, unlost, unfailed. It’s as if the Wheel, having asked what Zelda seeks, provides it. Zelda wants it to be okay, and “okay” for her is Sal, dauntless.

Chapter 23 ends in story present. Chapter 24 opens in story past: Having rescued Sal from the Wheel, Zelda is clueless about their next step forward, unsure the crossroads even exist. It’s time for the cavalry to gallop in, right? No, nothing so noisily dramatic. Scratch the bugles; ethereal silver bells will do. Scratch the troop of lathered horses; a single horse, immaculately white, will do, ridden by a very Galadriel of a white-clad woman, young but ages-wise, immune to all earthly stainage. She even speaks in high-fantasy fashion, eschewing “I’ve been looking for you guys forever” to “Long have I sought you.”

The princess, I presume! It looks like the White-Hat Cowboy has a counter in the White Lady of Elsinore, on a White Palfrey to boot! It remains only for those Whales cruising the Wheel-Storm to be White, proper avatars of natural/supernatural Malice or at least Indifference.

Yes.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

The Wheel is present in every alt. The wheel is a gorgeous inversion of the eldritch: it’s everyday experience that feels uncanny when compared to the all-encompassing perceptions within. The wheel’s spokes point to north stars, personal or astronomical. There are a lot of things in this book that claim to represent the really real; only the Wheel makes a persuasive case.

Which is ironic since it’s one of the few things that doesn’t take on anthropomorphic form to argue for itself. This is the first point at which it’s really struck me, for example, that the Challenger’s voice isn’t just Ramon’s internal monologue, but an actual entity in its own right—possibly the Cowboy. Or at least a near relation: what’s as American as guns, if not cars? Which puts a whole new light on the Challenger’s insistence that Only The Road Is Real. On this read, those claims are less Ramon’s own self-doubt and self-sabotage, and more the negging that keeps him in an abusive relationship with a genius machina. What happens, I wonder, when Ish’s firearm meets up with Ramon’s vehicle?

I wonder a lot of things, in fact. Maybe it’s the inevitable result of spending a chapter in close proximity to the heart of the really real: it’s increasingly obvious how much I don’t know. For example:

• In a place where all times are one time, are temporal paradoxes actually a thing we need to worry about? If so, did we just get one?
• Why does Zelda insist Older Sal is being tortured, given that Older Sal seems pretty happy (if pointy) whenever we encounter her?
• Are we about to learn the deal with Elsinore?
• If the gang really did make up the Crossroads, does that mean they aren’t there? (If the U.S. really did make up the nightmare alts, does that mean you wake up after getting eaten by a cannibal zombie? I suspect no, on both counts.)
• If Zelda planned “so much to do” with the woman in white ten years ago, what happened after that? And if that woman’s the Princess, what’s she been up to this past decade?

And et cetera. This is a master class in peeling away layers of assumption: from the reader, from the characters, from the genre(s). I know less than I thought I did at the beginning, but that’s the beginning of wisdom, right? No one ever says what the completion of wisdom involves. Probably more not-knowing, grumble.

This is such a big part of what Zelda and Sal struggle with: both are afraid to admit to not-knowing, and both want desperately for the other to deserve her pedestal. There would be real potential for a mature relationship there, someday, if they hadn’t tumbled into the sort of adventure that makes pedestals plausible. And so here’s Sal, sitting at the heart of the Wheel, torn in a tug-of-war between Zelda and Zelda. And here’s Zelda, torn by desire for Sal-who-was and fear/desire/repulsion for Sal-who-is. An endless moebius strip of mutual tug-of-war, drawing the universe forward.

Zelda feels a kinship with the Wheel, caught in a storm of grief. This seems both accurate and arrogant. The heart of reality is grieving for apocalyptic loss: not some nightmare-alt but the bone-foundation that the Cowboy seeks to deny and celebrate all at once. Survivors building in the ashes, making space amid those who did the burning, isn’t as cinematic as Mad Max stitchmouths—but it’s what every one of those nightmares is built to elide. Zelda doesn’t fully grasp it even walking the storm.

Maybe none of them grasp it—or they wouldn’t be so anxious to pull each other back from the center. After all how else, other than turning a wheel, are a gang of adventurers likely to finally make a revolution?

Next week, Nadia Bulkin’s “Seven Minutes in Heaven” asks why one world survives while the next one over dies—a pressing question for any alt-rider. You can find it in Nick Mamatas’ Wonder and Glory Forever anthology. [end-mark]

The post Into This World We’re Thrown: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 12) appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we cover Algernon Blackwood’s “A Victim of Higher Space,” first published in The Occult Review in December 1914. Text (particularly Barker’s accent) varies slightly between printings. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Physician Extraordinary John Silence has met many extraordinary people in his career as an occult detective and healer of psychic ailments. It’s therefore not unusual for his new man Barker to announce there’s “a hextraordinary gentleman” to see him—except that Barker can’t tell him this one’s name or describe him beyond his resemblance to a “cold wind,” and the fact that the man’s so thin Barker can hardly see him.

Silence, pleased that Barker’s proving usefully sensitive, excuses his confusion. Prompted, Barker remembers that the caller presented a letter from a friend who always refers “vitally interesting” cases. Silence has Barker show the man into his study rather than the padded chamber reserved for “candidates for the asylum.”

Even the study isn’t without safety contrivances. A spyhole allows Silence to scrutinize visitors before they assume their public masks. The guest chair is secured to the floor, and at need hidden buttons can release a narcotic gas around it. In previewing this visitor, Silence sees his hat, gloves and umbrella but no man. However, his ability to sense the proximity of any “incarnate or discarnate being” tells him someone’s in the room. What’s more, he senses the invisible man is scrutinizing him right back! He glimpses movement and realizes that something otherwise invisible partly blocks his view of the fireplace. A thin line appears and develops into an eye “bright with intelligence,” then a complete human figure: A middle-aged man extremely thin but otherwise ordinary-looking. His “vibrations” are reassuringly pleasant, though certain “currents and discharges” betray a disturbed mind.

The visitor, Racine Mudge, confirms he knew of Silence’s spyhole, and adds that he’s read Silence’s thoughts about the narcotic-triggering buttons and unmovable chair. Mind-reading is part of his strange condition as “a victim of Higher Space,” which he hopes Silence can treat. He’s encouraged that Silence projects sympathy, and that he expresses an understanding of “Higher Space” as a spiritual state rendered abnormal to humans at their “present stage of evolution.” Silence is also correct that Mudge’s dilemma isn’t accidental but the result of long, deliberate study. But it is chance circumstance that can send Mudge out of the world of three dimensions into one of four or more. Certain “human atmospheres,” “wandering forces,” combinations of color, and most of all certain sounds—perhaps Silence noticed a German street band passing outside shortly before entering? Mudge is particularly sensitive to Wagner’s music, which the band must have played.

Mudge takes the immoveable chair and relates his history. After inheriting wealth, he was able to avoid conventional schooling and so had nothing to unlearn when he dedicated himself to the higher mathematics for which he seemed to have an innate knack. Excited by groundbreakers like Bolyai and Gauss, and encouraged by one exceptional author, he realized that Higher Space partially borders our world; ergo, at “home” we see only portions of objects, whereas in Higher Space objects appear as they truly are. When he first slipped bodily into this new reality, Mudge was intrigued. Alarm came when at the approach of sleep he began, willingly or not, to enter the fourth dimension. There he was unable to control his movements, subject to queer geographical displacements and to finding familiar things and creatures rendered monstrous by their nearly unrecognizable “true forms.”

Silence is sufficiently advanced along the “legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformation” to believe Mudge’s story. He fetches a locked red book from a locked bookshelf. It holds the cure to Mudge’s suffering, but Silence can’t help but express regret that with such an opportunity to discover great things, Mudge would take the cure. It’s alternating between our world and Higher Space that sickens and terrifies him—now if Mudge were to leave behind his three-dimensional life entirely—

Mudge nervously begs Silence not to delay. He hears that German band returning! Silence opens his book. The cure, he says, lies in Mudge learning how to “block the entrances” into Higher Space. These are all inside his mind, and it’s concentration that can close them off. Silence will now read instructions for pulling off the trick.

But before he gets far, the band arrives, playing Wagner’s March from Tannhauser no less. Mudge panics, begging Silence to prevent him from vanishing. Silence tries to grapple the man to his chair, but his body slips away like air, to pass even through Silence’s own body. “Block the entrances!” Mudge cries. His internal struggles are to no avail. He flashes out of sight, his voice echoing in Silence’s mind: “Lost! lost! lost!”

Silence tells Barker that Mudge has left, and left behind his things. If he returns at any time, Barker should bring him instantly to Silence. He should also remember to think sympathetically of Mudge while he’s away, for Mudge is “a very suffering gentleman.”

Two days later, Silence receives a telegram from Bombay. It’s from Mudge, who informs him that he’s slipped out of Higher Space again, and he has blocked the entrances, a thousand thanks to the doctor! He encloses a London address, to which Silence tells Barker to send the left-behind hat, gloves and umbrella—exactly one month from this day and marked to be called for.

Barker sighs and goes his way, asking no further questions.

Libronomicon: Mudge has benefited (and suffered) from “the audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of Gauss… the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky…” and an unnamed “dreamer” who is probably Charles Hinton. But his new favorite comfort read has to be that little locked book that Silence conveniently keeps in his study.

Weirdbuilding: Bocklin was Swiss symbolist painter known for five version of The Isle of the Dead. All are somber depictions of a cloaked figure in a rowboat, approaching an island with sculpted cliff-dwellings to either side and a towering pine forest in the middle. They’re fascinating; I’m not sure they would be my choice to reassure nervous visitors.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Dr. Silence has a whole separate sitting room for people who are “only candidates for the asylum,” set up to handle “sudden violence.” This is not the only place where the story equates mental illness with violence; presumably then as now the mentally ill were actually far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence. Maybe even victims of the “concealed contrivances” in Silence’s sitting room.

Anne’s Commentary

When will financially independent gentlemen with a bent toward esoteric study learn that our own little three-dimensional world holds mysteries enough to occupy a lifetime of investigation, or several lifetimes if they’ve already discovered the secret of immortality and are getting bored? There are doubtless more undescribed flea beetles in Papua New Guinea than are dreamt of in entomological taxonomy, to name only one research opportunity. Leave extra-, inter-, hyper-, higher-dimensional space and parallel universes alone—they’re never anything but trouble, and you can’t get travel insurance to cover your lost luggage or funeral expenses.

Another thing, financially independent gentlemen—and ladies, though you seem to be underrepresented in weird fiction of this ilk: I can’t find a single health plan that covers extra-, inter-, hyper-, higher-dimensional related injuries, nor any list of participating providers that includes psychic-healing Physicians Extraordinary like the good Dr. Silence. So be prepared to pay out of pocket if you do manage to come back alive but spatially challenged or driven to madness by what you’ve experienced Out There. Whereas no one has ever been harmed while hunting unknown flea beetles in Papua New Guinea, unless of course they’re bitten by taipans or death adders while poking around the leaf litter, and even then the toxicology of Pacific Island elapids is another fascinating field of research.

Similarly, mamas, don’t let your children grow up to be mathematicians. Look what happens to Racine Mudge in today’s tale, or Walter Gilman in “The Dreams in the Witch House.” It’s okay if your kids grow up to be financially independent, but see above. On further thought, don’t raise composers given to eldritch harmonies or German Romantic High Opera, either. If they don’t end up like Erich Zann, they may perpetrate music that triggers dimension-hoppers trying to kick the habit, and that is just not cool.

Speaking of Richard Wagner, I wonder what Blackwood’s opinion of his work was. Does he mean to praise Wagner for creating music sublime enough to lift sensitive listeners like Mudge into higher planes, or does he mean to suggest the opposite, that a Wagner march might suffice to drive sensitive listeners (like Mudge) to desperate measures of escape? Either way, why does that German band keep trundling by? Silence himself can’t come up with an explanation for this, he can only shrug and state that it happened even so. I speculated briefly that an agent of Higher Space knew of Mudge’s triggers and so arranged for the band to haunt Silence’s neighborhood. But the simplest answer strikes me as more likely: Blackwood’s plot required someone to play some damn Wagner two damn times, and he therefore made it so.

Why not? Stranger things happen here, such as the very name Racine Mudge and the likelihood that a Frenchwoman of greatish expectations should have married an English bargeman. And from which side of his family did Mudge inherit an ancestral memory of and genius for higher mathematics? I think Blackwood is having some fun with this story, down to the comic relief provided by Silence’s Cockney serving man, Barker, who’s at once semi-clueless and encouragingly psi-gifted.

To return to the concerns with which I opened my comments. From personal experience, Silence has learned that while external stimuli can compel one to enter Higher Space, the entrances are internal, spiritual, and through concentration one can learn to block them. He has simple instructions on how to achieve such concentration in his Little Red Book. Mudge doesn’t get to hear them all before he’s sucked away from our reality, but apparently he figures out the trick for himself with no more complication than popping out in Bombay rather than London. Okay. If the solution to unwanted dimension-hopping is really this easy, I’m not so much against experimenting with it.

And to celebrate Mr. Mudge’s triumphant return, I’d like to time-express-mail him tickets to the 1914 Bayreuth Festival production of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

I’m sure he’ll enjoy it greatly, now that the good doctor’s cured him.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I ran across this story because I’m footnoting a new edition of Blackwood’s The Willows from Lanternfish Press, and went down a rabbit hole for a line about “the way a sound in the fourth dimension is supposed to come.” I discovered that Charles Hinton first proposed the concept in 1880, not referring to time as some modern speculators often do, but to additional directions of space. I also learned that Blackwood was certainly inspired by Hinton, and fleshed out his reaction to these ideas—chiefly the idea that taking new spatial perspectives was inherently tied to empathetically taking the perspectives of other humans—in “A Victim of Higher Space.”

It’s an interesting set of ideas, if occasionally eye-rolling to the modern reader who is me. A century-plus of woo-woo charlatans are not really Blackwood’s fault—well, no, maybe they are, I can imagine any number of charlatans taking John Silence as a model. But after many stories in which seeing beyond our customary reality is inherently horrific, it’s nice to see one where those views would be just fine if only we were ready. It’s getting ahead of ourselves, evolutionarily and spiritually, that results in seeing things we aren’t ready for—falling into Higher Space is fundamentally the equivalent of a kid sneaking an R-rated slasher flick. The “monstrous” is an artifact of our immaturity. We need a couple thousand more years of neural development before trying to see the familiar in an unfamiliar way, more real than we’re used to: the uncanny mountain rather than the uncanny valley.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t do a ton with these ideas other than heap them before the reader with enthusiastic smuggery. John Silence was created on the recommendation of Blackwood’s editor to tie together a set of otherwise unrelated tales of psychic phenomena. He’s also a smug, manipulative asshole. And if there’s one thing that ruins an asshole hero, it’s being constantly told how empathetic and kind he is. Blackwood could’ve leaned into it and made me root for the guy. But I’ve got no patience for hearing how nice it is that he non-consensually drugs his patients and spies on them through the peephole. Sherlock Holmes would never—well, at least not the drugs. (He drugs himself, and not while working.) He would totally spy on people through the peephole, if he weren’t so eager to show off to them. But Conan Doyle knows that Holmes is an asshole who’s also kind and sympathetic, and it makes him intriguingly nuanced. Blackwood misses that lesson.

Mudge embodies a more interesting set of authorial assumptions. It turns out the route to spiritual overachievement is to (1) avoid the biasing influences of parents, school, and any sort of social interaction, and (2) get lucky in the mathematical prowess of your past lives. Number 2 is why Mudge is a spiritual explorer rather than feral child or Outsider. He’s intuitive and psychic and deeply impressed by Silence, possibly because number 1 doesn’t give him a lot of actual sympathetic friends for comparison. Personally, if I have to tell someone not to non-consensually drug me, it puts me on edge. But to each their own.

Geometry is an ongoing fascination of Weird authors: not surprising, given the deeply non-intuitive implications of something that feels like it should be deeply intuitive. What makes more plain sense than a square or a circle? But expand out into dimensions beyond human perception, and you might have either a map to what humans could become, or to things with as much sympathy for us as we have for the lesser-dimensional beings of Flatland. Or less: the Hounds of Tindalos track us through the original sin of angles, and the Witch House offers all sorts of peril to mathematical grad students. On the spiritual side, both Wells and Le Fanu warn against trying out the wrong experiments, or even new teas.

Blackwood at least offers the possibility of graduation. Silence points out that Mudge might be on the edge of wondrous discoveries—he only needs the cure because he’d rather his recognizable life in this dimension than unrecognizable wonder. But others might make different choices—and might find those choices more palatable if made in company.

Next week, we enter the Medicine Wheel—or try—in chapters 23-24 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.[end-mark]

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This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 21-22. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Zelda and Ramon make camp near the Medicine Wheel. They’ve decided to wait for the others, but Ramon continues to fret about what-ifs, “piling contingencies like firewood against the winter.” His knack tells him Ish, Sarah and June are still together; Zelda knows that doesn’t mean they’re okay. She knows, too, that no plans they contrive will make a difference. “The Medicine Wheel was not her place, not Ramon’s, not Sal’s or Sarah’s or Ish’s.”

Ramon retires to the Challenger, Zelda to the campfire. She stares up at the sky “bruised in the shape of Sal,” in which “cracks pulsed like an infected wound against the stars.” She’s watched Ramon’s sunlight wear down to “steel and leather, edge and crease.” She called him, and he came. She called them all, and “what a crime that was.”

She rises. The Wheel never changes, and it has a power no one they’ve met understands. Zelda survived entering it once, when she chased after Sal. This time the Wheel might crush her.

She has no right to ask her friends to brave the journey. They’ve grown, while she’s just “a tired woman beneath the stars.”

The Wheel whispers. Zelda steps over its edge.

* * *

Ish, Sarah and June camp in an abandoned amusement park. Ish leaves the others to follow his knack deeper into the place. June’s ability to summon rot still troubles him. He believes that knacks derive from one’s “damage.” He needs certainty, Sarah safety, Zelda escape. Maybe June just needs Sal.

Ish feels Sal everywhere, “behind the surface.” He remembers college and thinks that while Sal may have won Zelda’s heart, he and Zelda were closer in one way: “their fear had the same texture…[they knew] what it was like to be alone.” He wants to believe Zelda’s dream of changing the world, even knowing you can’t build a place “with people who still worked like people and expect it to turn out any better than history had.” With the walls between alts overstretched, he could find Sal now if he wanted. But he wants to hear from someone else.

He finds a video arcade, a tent full of blank-screened game cabinets covered with obscene graffiti and spiderwebs. Blood stains one pinball machine. A toddler-sized pink teddy bear lurks between cabinets. Young Ish longed for the kind of arcades he saw in movies, where outsiders could vindicate themselves via high scores, but he never found them. Deep in the tent he discovers a cabinet decorated with Old West scenes, with no controlling device but a holstered revolver too genuine-looking for a game. He rigs a power-pack from one of their robot horses to start the machine.

What appears on screen is a cowboy. The cowboy, eyes hidden under his white hat, mouth all teeth. He says Ish called him, and he’s ready to talk. Alternatively, Ish could run away, but that’s not how Ish works. Both he and the cowboy do what needs doing, what’s right. Now, Ish didn’t make the cowboy, who’s been around since the first European settlers came to America, but Ish helped wake him, creating millions of screens to serve as the cowboy’s eyes, eyes into which millions of people would stare. The cowboy’s the one who walks “the thin bright line,” the dream that justifies all the white boys who’ve ever “looked over the horizon and said, I’m gonna go out and kill me who’s over there and take what’s his.”

Ish understands that the cowboy wants to stop Sal, but if they share that goal, why has the cowboy tried to kill Ish and his friends? The cowboy counters: Is Ish’s “girl,” Zelda, on their side? Ish only sees a fantasy Zelda. What she wants, under the lies she tells herself, is to get “her lady back.” There’s no better world, nothing beyond the crossroads. Ish has seen that. He knows what has to happen to stop the rot. Both cowboy and Ish are “needful evils.”

The cowboy offers Ish the holstered revolver. What with Zelda being a beacon for Sal, and June calling her too, Ish will need all six bullets, which the cowboy’s made “from truth and certainty and the melted stars of lawmen.” Six bullets: for Sal, Sarah, June, Ramon, Zelda—and Ish.

A tornado-Sal appears in the game sky.  Ish realizes Zelda must have entered the Wheel alone. The cowboy warns Ish to get moving before the Sal-storm arrives, then marches toward the tornado himself. The screen explodes, but the revolver remains.

Ish tries to convince himself that the cowboy’s just more rot, but he doesn’t speak in the rot’s voice. Unlike, say, the pink teddy bear that creeps up on Ish, exuding insect legs and dripping poison. Ish grabs the gun and shoots the horror.

Outside, thunder presages the storm. Ish tucks the gun in his pack and runs. (Five bullets left now. Who lives?)

In camp, June wakes from dreams of Sal, of climbing toward her on a tree endlessly tall. Sarah’s heard a gunshot. They’ll look for Ish if there’s time before the storm forces them to hitch. They prepare a robot horse. Ish rushes in, and reports Zelda has reached the Wheel. He replaces his robot horse’s power pack and leaps into the saddle.

Move now, and maybe they can catch Zelda in time.

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Cowboy: The Washington Post provides a rundown of the biggest good news stories from 2023. Highlights include a malaria vaccine, treatments for Sickle Cell Disease and postpartum depression, and a new treaty to protect oceans.

What’s Cyclopean: There’s something wrong with the creepy clowns depicted around that abandoned amusement park—wronger than most creepy clowns, I mean. “A rotten wind blew from the clown’s mouth, and ruffled the flags that were its teeth.”

Weirdbuilding: Ish has watched a lot of a certain sort of eighties teen movie, about kids “whose odd hobbies ended up saving the world or earning the affection of the Girl, which in that kind of movie was more or less the same thing.” Part of his head is still there.

Madness Takes Its Toll: The gang has talked to “sages… feather-cloaked witches… cackling, broke-toothed, mushroom-chewing madfolk” amid the alts, none of whom understand the power of the Medicine Wheel.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

This week’s theme is Bad Choices We Make When Left Alone for Five Minutes. Zelda gets into a spiral of how no one else should have to make these sacrifices—never mind that she already called the gang back to her and got them lost in the alts—and goes into the Medicine Wheel all by her lonesome. Ish wanders off in Creepy Clownland to talk to the Cowboy, and promptly gets silver-tongued into picking up the Magical Gun of American Mythohistory. Because no one else is strong enough to Walk The Line, so clearly he and the cowboy gotta do it. Here’s a tip: if someone tells you you’re a “needful evil,” maybe don’t go along with their plans.

Realizing that they couldn’t help splitting the party, this is one of many reasons why you never split the party. If you must, at least check your reflexive urges toward solo heroism with whoever came along with you. What’s that? You’re worried they might tell you to cut it the hell out? Huh, fancy that.

Ish believes knacks “reflect your damage.” To some extent I think he’s right; I also suspect that getting magical powers from your trauma responses does not pave a smooth road toward healing those responses. Ish can in one breath admit his need for certainty, and in the next be dead certain that he understands June’s psychology—and Zelda’s—perfectly. Here’s a tip: needing to feel certain doesn’t make your certainties correct. It’s maybe the one thing that the Cowboy is right about.

That’s not really fair. For the anthropomorphic personification of Lies Americans Tell Themselves To Feel Better About Genocide, the Cowboy has a surprising amount of self-awareness. Perhaps that balances Ish, who ignores all the self-aware things the Cowboy says in favor of somehow deciding that feeling better about genocide is a good idea. His kid—or the ancient power to whom he gave surveillance tech eyes—knows all his buttons. It’s the deadly appeal of being the one person rational enough to do the hard right thing (that regretfully involves sacrificing other people). It’s the fallacy of “The Cold Equations.”

The Cowboy claims that the alts aren’t possibilities, but nightmares. It’s Lovecraft all over, the conviction that Anglo-American civilization’s tenuous illusions are all that stand between humanity and Cannibals All The Way Down. If that’s true—the Cowboy quickly glosses over—then it’s not rot that causes clown-haunted amusement parks and Mad Max car gangs and plagues and heads on stakes. It’s just what privileged Americans believe would happen if they weren’t in charge. Also swiftly glossed over are the power and reality of actual alternatives. People really did run away from European settlements to join Native American communities, really did find better lives that way. Here’s a tip: if an entity was created to fight gods that hate “us” because of all that pesky genocide, maybe don’t go along with his plans.

But no, you’ve got to Walk The Line, because the alternative is the rot. The rot that whispers in “words on the edge of hearing in a language you’d forgotten since you dreamed childhood dreams.”

That doesn’t actually sound bad. Dangerous, maybe. Ish is wrong about June—she isn’t desperate for Sal, she’s desperate for change. Desperate enough, unlike a bunch of idealistic Yalies, not to flinch when she comes face to face with her desires. Desperate enough, willing enough, to climb the world-tree and see what’s beyond the top.

Just a little farther.

Anne’s Commentary

Was it really so long ago, Ish, that video games began to shoulder aside pinball and lure fresh crowds to communal dreams of conquest and the triumph of the underdog? There are those of us still alive who remember crowding around the early champions of each new game to see how the hell they were beating the program, or at least getting past the third or fourth wave that had most of us staring at GAME OVER and reaching for the next of too many quarters. Every payday I used to go through a whole roll of them being crushed by Centipedes, colliding with Ghosts, and watching my last Missile Base explode into pixelated fireballs. It wasn’t until I discovered Crystal Castles and Joust that I experienced the apotheosis young Ish craved, when “You could run up your score and people would see you, would understand that there was a point to you.” To be able to play on one quarter for hours or until your wrists gave out was also profoundly satisfying, and economical.

It really was a different thrill from rocking games on a home console or even in a MMORPG. I couldn’t say whether being a pro video gamer is more self-validating than being an old-time arcade superstar. I know I don’t get anything when watching a pro match close to the rush I got watching the first player at our local arcade defeat Dragon’s Lair. The cheers were so loud and long that, having earned them himself, Ish might have gone to Yale confident enough to have won Zelda before Sal did, or at least confident enough not to have let losing Zelda be such an enduring echo of trauma through his life. When Ish first thinks about “that Halloween disaster back in college,” I didn’t at first get what event he meant. It had to be something harrowing that happened in the alts, right? No, it was the Halloween party at which Zelda ran up to and kissed Sal, bursting Ish’s amatory bubble-dream. For him to have felt this revelation as a “disaster” at the time is understandable, but for him to apply such a strong term to it years later?

Sure, Ish could be using “disaster” in an ironic sense. Or he could be using it in an ironic sense meant, ironically, to mask the depth of his pain. See how complex are the inner lives Gladstone weaves for his characters. Chapters 21 and 22 both have an inward focus, first with Zelda, then with Ish. If cows ruminated as much as his people, they’d never get a meal digested. Which may be Gladstone’s point: Nobody in Last Exit has been able to digest what happened during their first round of alt-riding and pass out what couldn’t be assimilated. To queasily overextend the cow metaphor, Zelda and Ish have kept gnawing away in the pastures of rot and serpents, while Ramon and Sarah have crammed their alt-experiences into “stomachs” off the alimentary mainline, choosing to “forget” (more accurately, repress) rather than to fight on.

Ultimately, if you can neither assimilate or evacuate your intake, it being roughage too rough, you’re going to have a bellyache. If you have a bellyache, you’re going to bellyache about it. Then cue fraught interaction and/or violent action-action. That’s Gladstone’s pattern, and to be fair, often the natural rhythm of narrative.

The Chapter 21 “Zelda-internals” culminate in her guilt-ridden decision to walk the Medicine Wheel alone. Then one tiny paragraph of action: “She stepped over the edge.” Zelda’s kind of irritating me here. She’s dragged her friends out of their lives and through new alt-nightmares just to decide, wait, I’ll go after Sal solo, poor tired-woman-beneath-the-stars that I am. Not that it’s psychologically unrealistic for a human to act this way. As Ish ponders: While people still work as people do, you can’t expect them to build a good place, only one that’s screwed-up in a different way.

Rumination leads to more frenetic action in Chapter 22. First Ish confronts White-Hat Cowboy via vintage video game. The cowboy, he’s realized, is inimical toward Beyond-Sal. Does that mean this enemy of the alt-riders’ enemy can be their friend, or does it mean that the enemy of the cowboy must be the alt-riders’ friend? If the cowboy represents the reactionary “dream” of America, and by extension of humanity at large, what must Sal represent? Is her Storm the antidote to his Stasis? If rot can be safely weaponized, should Ish quell his doubts about June? With whom he can’t seem to avoid tussling, as the end of the chapter shows.

It’s established trope in weird fic that the more innocent a toy appears to be, the more likely it is Evil and murderous. What could be more innocent than a teddy bear? How about a pink teddy bear? Ish. How could you have turned your back on that stuffy from Hell?

Shoot teddy bears on sight and check for rot later: words to survive by in the alts.

Next week, Algernon Blackwood explores the fourth dimension in “A Victim of Higher Space.”[end-mark]

The post Into the Creepy Clown Mouth: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we cover E.F. Benson’s “Between the Lights,” first published in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories in 1912. Spoilers ahead!

“No, I don’t mind that sort of thing,” he said. “The paraphernalia of ghosts has become somehow rather hackneyed, and when I hear of screams and skeletons I feel I am on familiar ground, and can at least hide my head under the bed-clothes.”

A half-dozen guests have gathered for Christmas at the country residence of Everard and Amy Chandler, where our narrator has often spent the holidays. All Christmas Eve day, heavy snow falls, but indoors everyone enjoys billiards and Badminton and a romping game of hide-and-seek. As dim white fades into twilight dark, the party gathers for tea and ghost stories illuminated solely by a blazing fire. The guests regale each other with “blood, bones, skeletons, armour and shrieks,” while Everard listens in silence, still looking worn from his illness of that autumn. Narrator has just settled back, certain he’s told the most harrowing tale, when Everard speaks up. Ghosts and skeletons don’t bother him. After all, there are eight skeletons in the room now, disguised beneath skin and flesh. No, it’s the vague nightmares of childhood that were truly terrifying, the ones in which one didn’t know what one feared. If that atmosphere could be recaptured –

Amy rises, saying that Everard can’t want to recapture such terror again. Wasn’t once enough? It was, Everard agrees. But the guests, scenting a true ghost-story, beg him to continue. Narrator feels that the “childish gaiety” of the preceding hours has changed to the tension in which “real terrors were going to lurk in dark corners.”

The extinction of a log throws Everard’s face into shadow, out of which his voice sounds “slow but very distinct.” Last Christmas Eve, he reminds the gathering, the weather was so warm that they played croquet on the lawn, where a single dahlia was still in scarlet flower. He was watching the match when suddenly he shivered. The brick wall surrounding the lawn seemed to heighten and shrink inward until all light vanished save for a glimmer. He fixed on the red dahlia, only to see it become a feeble fire by the light of which he found himself in a low-roofed shed as foul-smelling as “a human menagerie… uncleaned and unsweetened by the winds of heaven.” The inhabitants were human-shaped yet somehow bestial and very small. They chattered and pointed at him. One rose, clad in a knee-length shirt, with bare and hairy arms. Realizing that “nightmare impotence” had paralyzed him, Everard tried futilely to scream. Then, at once, he returned to the croquet lawn, trembling and dripping sweat. He must have fallen asleep and dreamed, yes, yet he’s convinced he did not. Call it hallucination instead.

Dream or hallucination, the vision haunted him for months, as if “something had actually entered into [his] very soul, as if some seed of horror had been planted there.” Morning after morning he’d wake to find himself “plunged into an abyss of despair.” His wife and doctor assured him he wasn’t going mad, and the doctor recommended a change of scene.

They went to London, where the memory of his vision “grew every day more vivid, and ate… like some corrosive acid into [his] mind.” From there, they traveled to a remote and wild part of Scotland. It was close enough to the sea for mists to frequently roll in; the local gillies [guides] warned him to always carry a compass in order to find his way home through the murk. However, a series of clear days made him forget the device.

One day he and his gillie Sandy followed their quarry to a tableland that on one side sloped sharply to a loch, on the other more gently to the river by which his lodge stood. Sandy insisted they climb the more dangerous slope, claiming the deer would scent them otherwise. The going was treacherous, over boulders and among clumps of heather swarming with adders. At the top they found the deer had caught their scent anyway, as anyone should have known from the direction of the wind. Everard wondered what Sandy’s real reason was for avoiding the gentler slope. They were lucky enough by midafternoon to bag a big stag, and Everard felt his dogging dread give way to “an extreme sense of peace.”

Sandy urged their return—a sea-mist was rising and would make the climb down the craggy slope even more difficult. Everard discovered he’d forgotten his compass, more reason to descend by the gentler slope. After much argument, Everard won out. Halfway down, the mist overtook them, but Everard’s respite from fear continued. He lead, Sandy following closely as if scared. Evening approached, the air grew colder, snow began to fall. After confused wandering, Everard heard the river, their goal. Then, as if “in terror of pursuit,” Sandy yelled and bolted out of sight. Everard’s momentary alarm, however, gave way almost to gaiety. He spotted a blackness in the white chaos of the storm. It was a wall with a rough door in it.

He followed a low passage into a circular enclosure open to the sky. Its walls were only four feet high, with broken stones suggesting they once supported a floor. Abruptly his long terror returned, for he saw that his vision was fulfilled and that a figure three and a half feet high was stealing towards him. He heard it stumble over a stone, smelled the overpowering stench of the place, but he couldn’t scream or move. As the figure crept closer, terror broke his paralysis, and he fled the ruin and plummeted down the slope to the river track and his lodge. Next day he started developing the pneumonia that would lay him up for weeks.

Well, Everard says from his armchair, that’s his story. One explanation is that he stumbled into an ancient Picts’ castle where a sheep or goat had taken shelter. But the coincidence between vision and event could give believers in second sight something to mull over.

Is that all, narrator asks. “Yes,” Everard answers. “It was nearly too much for me.” Then the dressing-bell rings and breaks up their tale-telling circle.

What’s Cyclopean: “A temerarious dahlia” still blooms at Christmastime.

Libronomicon: Chandler jokes that telling this story makes him feel like Hamlet directing his play-within-a-play. But who’s the guilty uncle?

Madness Takes Its Toll: Chandler wonders about the sanity of that temerarious dahlia. And also of himself. His doctor says he’s fine, but has no opinion about the dahlia.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Ah, a cozy old-fashioned Christmas. Roasting chestnuts, ice skates, trees decked with garlands, treat-filled stockings… ghost stories?

Well, yes. How better to pass the time around a crackling fire, than to tell chilling tales that make the firelight feel safer, the gathered friends more necessary for comfort, the spiked punch more appealing? Really, this is a tradition worth bringing back: sharper and stronger than the myriad holiday-themed albums from everyone hoping to find a spot in the modern stocking.

Translated into prose, the teller of Christmas shivers tries to recreate as much of the original cozy context as possible. But Benson’s playing with the form again, and in the opposite direction from chilling-to-cozy “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery.” His warmly hospitable host, normally a source of croquet and hide-and-seek and otherwise genial house party fare, has a tale he’s reluctant to tell. Apparently, his last house party wasn’t so cozy as all that—even if no one else noticed.

One of the most comforting things about the traditional ghost story is the promise of resolution. The haunt will be explained, or at least captured. Events will flow in somewhat predictable fashion, from initial intimation to hair-raising confrontation. True experiences of the uncanny have no such reassurance. It may simply be a moment of inexplicability, a single event that defies explanation. It probably lacks a clear story arc. It is certainly unlikely to get tied up by a satisfying resolution. So it sticks with you, building chronic disquiet rather than acute adventure.

So too with Chandler’s experience. There’s his initial vision of an ancient setting. (A wretched hive of scum and villainy?) There are the scaled-down humanoid creatures, definitely not hobbits but not anything else specific. Fair folk? Neanderthals? Ghosts? Gnoles? And then he just… can’t get over the vision for months. He’s healthy, but it eats at him. Eventually he goes on holiday to Scotland, like you do. There, despite the best efforts of his hunting guide, he stumbles through the mist and into his vision. And he was having such a nice day, too.

Whereupon he escapes, and never learns anything more about what happened. This despite the fact that gillie Sandy clearly knows something. Maybe Chandler fires the guy for not explaining his anxiety in the first place, or for running away. Maybe Sandy continues to resist saying anything useful despite subsequent demands. Maybe when he ran away, he tripped and fell into a bog. Never mind, leaving it all unresolved makes the whole thing less narratively satisfying, but more plausible. Which, of course, makes it more satisfyingly chill-inducing.

Meanwhile in another story, the mysterious wee beasties are equally confused about this human dude who keeps stumbling into their house.

My favorite part is actually the framing story: the tension between comforting ritual and real fear, between silly and serious play. The house party is a liminal space, where British nobility can drop their dignified armor and play hide and seek, or admit that beneath our outer differences we’re all skeletons—and as we all know, once you release the rigid trappings of imperial culture, anything might happen. Even the admission that said nobles can truly be frightened, and might never understand what they’re frightened of.

Final thing that’s eating at me unresolved: what are the “lights” that the story takes place “between”? The best I can come up with is “lights” as a term for eyes: that the events (or simply the fear of them) takes place between Chandler’s eyes, i.e., in his brain. Dissatisfied with this answer, I tried to figure out if it was a Hamlet reference—no luck, Hamlet talks about light but not anything between lights. Maybe the lights are the explicable, comfortable life on either side of the weirdness. Maybe it’s Chandler’s own fireplace and the beasties’ low, guttering hearth. Or maybe Benson has as much trouble coming up with titles as I do.

Anne’s Commentary

I wondered why Benson titled this story “Between the Lights” rather than something more obvious like “A Christmas Eve Premonition” or “The Exceedingly Malodorous Pictish Ruin in the Mist.” From the title alone, I pictured streetlamps illuminating all-too-short stretches of pavement on a moonless night—between them would be all-too-long stretches of darkness in which anything might be lying in fiendishly grinning ambush. More broadly, then, what’s between any lights must be the dark, as day alternates with night and the sun-dominated seasons alternate with those in which the moon holds fickle sway. Light, dark, light: That’s the optimistic construction of matters, but the pessimistic Dark, light, dark is just as viable. What was there In The Beginning, after all?

The frame of Benson’s story takes place between the lights of Christmas Eve and Christmas morn: The “vague white light” of the snowy day has given way to a darkness lit only by the Yule fire, for the electric lights have been quenched to provide a suitable atmosphere for ghost stories. Firelight also honors the primordial tradition of people gathering around a blaze and defying the dark by dwelling on its terrors. The creation of light and heat more or less on demand is humanity’s earliest mastery of its environment, so why wouldn’t humanity boast about it a little? The Chandlers’ guests boast by switching off the lightbulbs, but only until indulging in adrenaline-powered endorphin rushes gets too real; then somebody unceremoniously throws the switches back on.

Everard’s too-authentic tale takes place between an unseasonably sunny Christmas Eve and the mist-enhanced fall of an autumn night. He has passed from winter through spring and summer to winter again, and not just to any winter’s day but to the one hovering on the Winter Solstice, the astronomical event immemorially celebrated as the turn of shortening days into increasing ones. Apart from their Saturnalia shindigs, select Romans celebrated my favoritely named ancient holiday, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or the birthday of the invincible sun, which harkens back to the pre-Zoroastrian sun god of Iran, Mithra.

I don’t know about Mithra, but wouldn’t we like to think that the sun—the light—is invincible? Isn’t it particularly terrible that Everard’s premonition should have plunged him from the crazy brilliance of croquet on December 24th into a shadow-den of horrors that would haunt him until the vision came true? And what are the horrors but our ancestors, or a monstrous offshoot of them that lives in little-mitigated darkness and unrelieved squalor? Remember, early-20th-century man, that you are an (arguably fortunate) accident of your genes, and unto (arguably unfortunate) accidents of your genes you may return. You might also get eaten by any remnants that linger on in the wilds of Scotland, because surely they are cannibalistic, and hungry.

There’s an interesting article on the custom of telling holiday ghost stories on the Carnegie Museum of Natural History website. Andrew Huntley traces it through the millennia humans have been jawing around campfires to the Puritans’ rejection of Christmas as a holiday to the reinvigoration of Christmas traditions that followed Dickens’ publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843. As he notes:

“Humans haven’t changed much biologically in several thousand years, and a person’s physical reaction to a harmless scare—elevated heart rate, endorphin rushes caused by adrenaline—is still essentially the same. The reaction to hearing a ghost story around the burning Yule fire became a tradition; a feeling of warmth and group bonding at what was the coldest and darkest time of year.”

Presumably the scare Everard delivers to his guests isn’t entirely harmless, but he does turn his tale over for authentication to such dubious experts as “those who believe in second sight.” And luckily his guests are saved by the dressing-bell before they can muse too much about uncanny visions and troglodytes. With enough seasonable victuals and strong potations, we can hope they make a complete recovery.

With strong potation in hand, I wish you all the joys of the season and look forward to more weirdness in the coming year!

We’re off for the remainder of the year! We’ll meet again in 2024 to partake of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit, chapters 21-22.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as r_emrys@wandering.shop, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post Have a Merry Scary Christmas: E. F. Benson’s “Between the Lights” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 19-20. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Ramon and Zelda have landed in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven sporting luminescent algae blobs uncomfortably shaped like humans. Under a cracked sky, they argue about whether they should head for the Medicine Wheel or search the alts for June, Sarah and Ish. Ramon points out that they’ll be lucky to get one more trip out of the damaged Challenger, so the Medicine Wheel it is.

The Challenger makes it to within a quarter mile of the Wheel; Ramon and Zelda push it the rest of the way. This version of the Wheel sits atop Wyoming’s Dry Fork Ridge, overlooking an endless pine forest, itself overgrown and abandoned by all but the wind. No animals, even insects, venture near. Some cities and holy sites have echoes in other realms. New York, for example, exists in most alts, but the Medicine Wheel is in every alt, always basically the same: A ring of white stones with spokes radiating from the center to the circumference. In some places, it’s revered, in others forgotten. Always one of its spokes points to the North Star. Always except, for some unfathomable reason, back in the alt-riders’ home world.

They found the Wheel after a year of unsuccessfully hunting for the crossroads. The alts they visit are invariably ruined, but each has its tales of a “shining citadel” where people flew and tears were never shed. Sometimes the alt-riders even found a crystal city ringing with the “ethereal laughter of children.” The children, however, were not to be found, and after all, one’s kingdom could be kept free of weeping if only you surgically removed everyone’s tear ducts.

Long debate failed to provide answers about the Wheel. Could a place have a mind, gather spin, hop between worlds as they did? Sal wanted to try communicating with it, but then she was always the one pushing to investigate an alt and help its inhabitants, altruism that often landed the friends in trouble. Zelda always wanted to move on toward the “grail” of the crossroads—where they’d find the power to make all things right.

Sal’s mind was made up. One night she went into the Wheel alone. Now, with Ramon, Zelda remembers how clouds swallowed the moon and the wind bore all that world’s rot to them. Lightning came for Sal, forcing Zelda to rescue her. Ramon reminds Zelda that Sal almost died in the Wheel, and admitted that she didn’t even see the crossroads. Zelda says “The princess did.” Ramon counters that the princess still couldn’t reach the crossroads. But Elsinore holds the only other road to their ultimate destination.

Ramon knows that if they step into the ring, storm and rot will come. He says they need to wait a day for the others and talk the next step through. If the Wheel’s the only way, they’ll walk it together. “Together,” Zelda agrees, but the brave word sounds hollow under the cracked sky.

* * *

The other riders have hitched away from the cowboy’s posse to an abandoned amusement park. Crucified bodies, some three-armed, flank the entrance, but whatever “hate-pride biker gang” once ruled here has “chewed itself to death.” Not a cozy camping spot, but at least the structures provide firewood and cover.

June sleeps restlessly on one side of their fire—she collapsed after the hitch, spent by her efforts. Ish paces a near-circle around the fire, always avoiding June. He and Sarah continue their argument about June’s “knack” of summoning rot. Ish is convinced the girl’s a danger, while Sarah defends her. The exchange devolves into Sarah blasting Ish for his high-tech campaign to monitor rot in their own world. Ish blasts Sarah for running away from the fight to the safety of a medical degree and suburban soccer games. Both are too tired to fight for long. The alts are worse now, aren’t they, Sarah asks. Her elders knew how bad they could get; now Sarah knows, and she wonders if back in college they were “too young and dumb to see that we lost the war before we were born.”

Once, back then, when Sarah and Ish were lost together, their mutual terror and despair drew them together like magnets. They had sex in “fields of glass,” under “a toxic aurora sky.” Sarah later realized the consolation of the act was not tenderness, but surrendering to a merely physical release, no more meaningful than what occurred “with any number of forgettable college dorm room nights.” When Ish tries to embrace her now, Sarah pushes him away. Parted, they watch each other in silence. Sarah admits to herself that the way she has walled her despair up with purpose, vows, love and work has not been good or right. She knows that others build similar walls, and she’s tried to let that realization make her kind—but still.

Ish says he’s sorry first. They aren’t sorry, though, Sarah thinks. It’s just hard.

This Week’s Metrics

Fighting the Rot (or Maybe the Cowboy): We’re helping redwoods migrate.

What’s Cyclopean: Empty cities built for people fourteen feet tall at the shoulder. If those people (now absent) had one eye each, the term becomes even more appropriate.

The Degenerate Dutch: Etymology is “a right-handed man”, in English at least, preserving its biases in words like “sinister.”

Anne’s Commentary

I was hoping that in Chapter Nineteen everyone would arrive at the Medicine Wheel and get on with their quest already. Okay, so Zelda and Ramon do get there after a ride made harrowing less by “wolf-haunted forest alts” and “empty cyclopean cities built” than by the accelerating decline of the Challenger. Gladstone’s right to truncate this bout of alt-hitching; Chapters Sixteen and Eighteen served up enough gruesome ruined-worlds action to last us a while. To last me a while, anyway, while Chapter Seventeen provided useful backstory about the group’s first attempt to reach the crossroads.

After rereading Nineteen, I see it was better for only one pair of the separated alt-riders to land at the Wheel in this chapter. Gladstone’s first priority must be to describe this pivotal structure: its always-the-same-but-different appearance, its properties, a brief history of the alt-riders’ previous experiences with the Wheel and the theories they’ve devised about it. To have all five characters together—and inevitably arguing and angsting—would have detracted from our introduction to the omnipresent circle of white stones and radiating spokes. Bits of character development slip in smoothly, as in the contrast established between activist-in-all-alts Sal and crossroads-fixated Zelda. Also nice is Ramon’s little epiphany about how he and Zelda are both “erratics”—in geological terms, rocks borne far from home by glaciers, “big stones moved only in disaster.” He and Zelda thus share a bond that his desertion could break but not destroy.

Chapter Nineteen closes with a fresh reference to an alt-destination called Elsinore. Elsinore is the English name for Helsingor, the Danish city in which Shakespeare set Hamlet. Gladstone’s Elsinore has a princess who’s seen the crossroads and perhaps, like Sal, “a better place. A future.” Shakespeare’s Elsinore boasts not an actual princess but a coulda-been one, if Ophelia had lived to marry her suitor, Prince Hamlet. Which she didn’t, having instead descended into floral-bedecked madness and drowned herself, maybe by intention, maybe by accident. But wait, there’s also a 2019 video game called Elsinore, in which the player character Ophelia has prescient visions of the carnage at the end of Shakespeare’s play: SPOILER ALERT – Pretty much everyone dies, and Ophelia kicks it a few scenes back, off-stage to add to her other humiliations.

In the game, Ophelia operates in a four-day time loop (always restarting at her death) during which she tries to prevent the tragic ending. There are thirteen possible outcomes, which makes me think of the multiple outcomes of Last Exit, represented not by time loops but by infinite alternative worlds. Elsinore’s outcomes differ widely in Tragedy Level, whereas all the alts the friends have visited so far have suffered calamitous ones (from a human point of view.) I wonder if the princess in Gladstone’s Elsinore might be “related” to the game-Ophelia in her unique position to change the future, albeit through intermediaries like the Yale alt-riders.

All right, so it’s really Chapter Twenty that had me itching for everyone to get on with it already. Everyone being Sarah and Ish, since June contributes nothing from her sleeping bag but the intermittent twitch or moan. Ish is still in the throes of paranoia over June’s rot-based knack, while Sarah still defends the girl, basing her advocacy on the simple fact that June saved their lives. I wanted Ish to calm the hell down and give Sarah—and June—a break. Admittedly, if anything could justify paranoia in a rot-fighter, it would be the summoning of rot by a supposed ally, and so I guess I should cut Ish some slack for carrying his rants across chapters. Nor is it unbelievable that Ish and Sarah’s argument over June should deteriorate into the same old accusations and resentments. Ish tells Sarah to grow up. She tells him he doesn’t know what growing up looks like. At least Ish has been doing something to save people from falling through the serpent-generated cracks in the world, while Sarah’s been running from the truth into the cardboard comfort of “normality.” Sarah’s counter is that she’s doing what her father, her people, have done before her, “put on new spots” to blend in, while knowing core-deep, from history, “what the alts were.” She’s the one facing the terrible questions: what if their fight was never winnable, or worse, what if it was and they’d had their chance but lost?

Huh. My first-read annoyance with Ish and Sarah for just sitting around airing grievances seems to be fading into appreciation for how Gladstone has taken time to clarify their differing reactions to a mutual dilemma—and their mutual reaction to a particular terrifying episode among the many of their alt-riding past. Stress made strange sex partners in the “fields of glass” alt; so here’s the Sarah-Ish connection hinted at earlier! But for Sarah at least, it was a connection of “meat and juice and sweat” only, another way to wall herself from despair, but one less forgivable than the walls of “vows and love and work” perhaps. At any rate, it’s a connection that Sarah and Ish don’t fall into a second time. Instead they focus on what’s clearly a good thing, gathering more firewood even though they already have enough.

Can you ever have too much warmth and light out in the alts?

Ruthanna’s Commentary

This week, I kept a catalog of world-ending disasters mentioned in passing, and estimated their likelihoods: atomic war (probably common given all our world’s near misses), zombies (probably common given our fictional obsessions), plague and air pollution (both all too ubiquitous), gray goo (requires software that never crashes), werewolves (requires a miracle or magic), supervolcanoes (hate ‘em, don’t wanna think about it), gravity failures (very curious how that happened). There are cities where no one cries because their tear ducts are surgically removed (ouch), and fiefdoms with microchipped technoserfs (unpleasantly plausible), and the dead amusement park with mummified bodies—three-armed, yet—crucified near the entrance (described in a paragraph that includes literal and figurative roller coasters). Some alts are lifeless; others host people who can still benefit from seeds and antibiotics.

Will any of these worlds ever recover? Our Earth’s been through at least five mass extinctions not counting the Great Oxygenation Catastrophe or the in-progress depredations of the Holocene, killing about 70-90% of species each time. (Wikipedia nightmare fuel rabbit hole here.) And each time, life returns—it may take millions of years, but on a world where the air’s still breathable to something, evolution ultimately restores diversity. But this supposes no extradimensional rot, no magical limit on further growth or goodness. It also supposes an extremely long-term perspective.

Side question: what’s up with all those dinosaurs? Why are we counting the elimination of an extinction event in with all the new extinction events? Maybe the dinos are actually Jurassic Park style failures of humanity to consider whether they should as well as whether they could. (You totally should. Just start with small herbivores and don’t let the capitalists take over; also talk to an actual zookeeper.)

We hear a lot about what’s consistent across alts. Apocalypse is one constant; another, it turns out, is the Medicine Wheel. Sarah named it—the only one of the gang with the right to bestow such a name—but no one’s comfortable with it. Still, given last section’s hints about the cowboy, the might be more accurate than they know. If America is a cowboy riding 500 years of genocide and conquest, doesn’t it make sense that there would be something older and unbreakable—a survivor of that conquest? The Wheel always points toward the North Star, except in our own world. Because our own world hasn’t yet settled into apocalyptic stasis?

Maybe it’s the leftovers of that long-term perspective, but I’m a bit weirded out by the idea of the North Star as a symbol of constancy here. After all, we had a different North Star (Thuban in the constellation of Draco, to be specific) less than 5000 years ago, well after humanity came to North America. Presumably the wheel points to whatever’s in the appropriate position, but still.

Back to life’s recovery: Sarah speculates about whether there was ever a real chance for the gang to save the world. It’s a double-edged sword of a question: they don’t want to have deluded themselves, but they also don’t want to have failed on something that consequential. Helplessness is at least relaxing; if there’s nothing you can do then there’s nothing that you need to do.

Except that helplessness is an illusion: there’s always something you can do. Ish and Sarah don’t agree on what that thing is, but they’ve both been doing their own version of it. Sarah’s made small safe spaces, living a good if constrained life—walling up despair with purpose and friendship, and trying to be kind. Ish has decided that if you aren’t making big dramatic tradeoffs and selling your soul, you aren’t really making a difference—but even if he’d never admit to such an emotional, individual motivation, I suspect it’s because that’s what Sal did.

Ish won’t acknowledge that Sarah’s acts matter, but not all consequential action is dramatic. That may be even harder to see then usual after your fifth fight with cannibal zombies.

Next week, join us for a cup of eggnog and a Christmas haunting in E. F. Benson’s “Between the Lights”. [end-mark]

The post Wheels Within Wheels: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 10) appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we cover Remy Nakamura’s “Wet Dreams in R’lyeh,” first published in Frances Lu Pai Ippolito and Mark Teppo’s 2023 The Cozy Cosmic anthology. It’s a fun, fast read—go pick it up! Spoilers ahead.

“A wave of horror washed over us. This home had clearly not been remodeled since the seventies. How was that drab olive wallpaper ever a thing?”

In a rundown Capitol Hill Victorian lives a chosen family of “lovely weirdos,” among whom narrator Ivy feels “almost normal.” She’s a trans woman who once belonged to an “off-brand offshoot” Mormon sect in Idaho. ZeroRaven is a giant albino penguin from a lost city in Antarctica. Minnie is a member of the crustacean-fungal-insectoid Mi-Go race, exiled for protesting her peoples’ habit of stealing brains. Punch, a “cerulean blue-haired, spiked-pierced-tattooed wonder,” flaunts their gills when not in public; formerly they were part of a secret Dagon sect in Kyushu.

Tony R reminds Ivy of “the toxic cismen” of her uncle’s Mormon sect, with the “never-fading smiles” that cloaked their nefarious behind-the-scenes activities. Apart from the smile, however, Tony’s a good guy. He rescued all the housemates and now leads their cell in the Anti-Cult League Worldwide (ACLW.) Today he has a new mission for his crew: They’re headed to Anaheim to “help contain a Cthulhu cult.” No worries: This won’t be dangerous like their rescues of kids from hardcore sacrifice-loving groups. They’re just going to sneak into the cult’s HQ and plant some surveillance equipment. Punch protests that this sounds like black ops work, which Tony has assured the team they won’t be doing. Ivy, who has a silent crush on Punch, privately backs them up after the briefing, but Tony follows a reminder of what she owes the League with a request that she keep an eye on Punch for him. After all, the Deep One worshippers of Dagon do have ties to the Cthulhu cult.

On the flight from DC to LA, Ivy sits beside Punch and tries to reassure them that Tony “wouldn’t steer them wrong.” Punch says they don’t know about Tony, but the rest of the team are “survivors” who should trust their instincts. Ivy wasn’t just “rescued” from her sect, she chose to leave it, and she—all of them—deserve credit for that.

The night before Operation Save the Cultists, Ivy shares a motel room with Minnie and all Minnie’s “charges,” dying mice and birds and bugs to whom she’s gifted immortality by transplanting their brains into tiny robots. Ivy confides to Minnie her worries about the pending mission—maybe Minnie and ZeroRaven should “hang back”. Minnie calls over one of her friends, a roach transformed into a robot scarab and named Eustace. He’s equipped to transmit audio and video and, hidden in Ivy’s pocket, can let Minnie and ZeroRaven keep tabs on the raid from the team van.

In Anaheim, Tony and Ivy and Punch, disguised as Cox Cable techs, enter the Cthulhu cult’s safehouse. To their horror, it’s decorated in 70s-era olive and mustard. Marginally worse is the surprise attack by black-robed cultists and the revelation of Tony’s double-dealing—it’s he who commands the cultists to subdue his teammates. Punch fights with superhuman strength but is overwhelmed. Ivy’s knocked unconscious.

Ivy and Punch wake in a soundproofed room in which cultists pore over computer monitors and Tony grins at them. They’re strapped into dentist chairs, their heads covered with metal colander contraptions sprouting wires. Tony admits that he never really left the Cthulhu cult and has run the ACLW to recruit new members. The only cell he couldn’t convert was theirs. The ranch house cultists, Tony recruited from rescued engineers and code monkeys. You see, he villainsplains, magic hasn’t worked to find and wake Cthulhu, so he’s decided to try science. The contraptions on Punch and Ivy’s heads are linking them neurophysiologically, so that Ivy will feel the pain Tony inflicts on Punch, as well as their emotions. And vice versa. Neural amplifiers will increase their shared torment to exquisite levels. In minutes now, undersea drones will land on sleeping Cthulhu’s head and through neural transmitters inject their agony into his dreams, rousing the god and bringing about the End of the World!

Ivy can’t tell if Eustace is still in her pocket. She hopes he’s returned to Minnie and ZeroRaven, and that they’re speeding inland from the “global coastal devastation” about to occur. On the monitors she can see Cthulhu’s mountainous head and redwood-massive tentacles. The drones have landed. Tony begins to torture the linked Punch and Ivy with common kitchen utensils. The tech cultists report promising response from the Great One, and Tony crows in triumph. Ivy can only look at Punch and pray he can read her goodbye and wish I could kiss you final thoughts.

Then chaos erupts as Minnie, ZeroRaven and the miniature robots burst into the room. The robots attack panicked cultists. ZeroRaven punches Tony out, then directed by Punch, goes to the monitors to detach the drones from Cthulhu’s head. Minnie scrambles to free Punch, but Ivy’s panicking, and her amplified panic is being transmitted to Cthulhu! But Punch leaps onto Ivy and kisses her until she’s “floating, sinking, settling into deep deep bliss.” Her drone transmitter remains on Cthulhu, while Punch’s drone swims off, giving them a view of the Great One. He is indeed Great, to judge by the “towering, cyclopean”… response… displayed by his lack of pajama bottoms.

Ivy’s blushing furiously, but before ZeroRaven frees her drone from Cthulhu, she sends the still slumbering god all her “relief, calm, and yep, desire” along with this message: Since he’s now having such a wonderful dream rather than troubled ones, hadn’t he better put off rising and “descend into the delightful deep”?

There will be plenty of time for him to rise in another eon or two.

What’s Cyclopean: Ahem.

The Degenerate Dutch: Tony reminds Ivy “just a teensy bit of the toxic cismen I’d left behind.” He may never get mean or scary… but maybe you still can’t trust someone who’s served both Cthulhu and QAnon. (Or NXIVM, a now-defunct multi-level-marketing scam/self-improvement cult/trafficking organization/racketeering scheme.)

Weirdbuilding: I spot guest stars from “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “Whisperer in Darkness,” and “Mountains of Madness.” And, of course, “Call of Cthulhu”.

Anne’s Commentary

In the 1960s, a popular saying was “Never trust anyone over thirty.” That won’t do for the DC ACLW cell, since several of its members may be hundreds if not millions of years old. For Ivy and crew going forward, I expect the motto will be “Never trust incessantly smiling cismen.” With Tony gone, maybe they can recruit a Yith tired of hopping the millennia and wearing someone else’s body. It and Minnie could have a great time up in the safehouse attic.

As its title pretty much guarantees the reader, “Wet Dreams in R’lyeh” is a romp rather than a harrowing tale of god-level aliens crushing humanity under their cyclopean pseudopods or, er, reproductive members. I can’t say I ever envisioned Cthulhu donning pajamas. He always struck me as too comfortable in his own rubbery integument to require clothing; therefore I assumed that any erectile organs he possessed would be allowed to sway free in the icy abyssopelagic currents. Presumably he’d have sufficient minions to keep deep sea organisms from nibbling his unprotected tender bits until such time as he rose in glory. Although Nakamura’s point may be exactly that, given adequate stimulation, Cthulhu could rise in glory even when asleep. How that does humanize him and contribute to the “cozy” nature of the story! Dreaded C, you big old plushy, you!

Ahem, you big old ages-18-and-up plushy. Let’s not even imagine Dreaded C inflatables. The most devoted cultist must have limits, right? Or not, as may be another of Nakamura’s points. Tony R doesn’t scruple to cultivate for future sacrifice the people he’s rescued. Nor does he have the rudimentary decency to save his HQ from hideous 70s decor. If he’s got money for super-high-end technology and unlimited energy drinks, he has money for fresh paint, carpets and furniture. Have some pride in your lair, man! No one’s suggesting you blow your cell’s cover by redoing the place in Super-Villain Moderne, just something from IKEA or Crate and Barrel, damn.

I’ve hated on Tony enough. For the rest of this dynamic horrors-hunting team I have nothing but love. And curiosity. For me, the most surprising member is ZeroRaven. The albino penguins Lovecraft created in At the Mountains of Madness were basically shoggoth-fodder. ZeroRaven is not “your typical penguin.” He’s the team’s tech wizard and an expert gamer. Also, he wears mirror-shades, perhaps in ironic awareness of his trope. In one sentence, Nakamura suggests the source of his peculiarities: Ivy “marveled at how [ZeroRaven] handled the controller with his weirdly pseudopod-like, prehensile wingtips.” Could he be a cross between penguin and shoggoth? Yes, please.

Minnie may get her name from being smaller than the classic Mi-Go, only the size of a crow. Could her diminutive stature indicate a normal developmental stage or morphological variation in the species? Or might “full-size” Mi-Go regard it as a defect? If so, that could have added to her outsider status. Within the DC cell, she’s found a chosen family and (like Bladerunner’s J. F. Sebastian) she has lots of friends—she makes them, from scratch. Well, not quite from scratch. Some of her friends have “bodies” made from “$80 mini-drones from Amazon,” and all of them have the brains of little creatures saved from death and housed in neat jars, Yuggoth-style.

Punch comes from a secret Dagon sect in Kyushu, Japan. Presumably, it’s a group old enough to have produced human-Deep One hybrids, which is what Punch seems to be—they can pass for human as long as they keep their gills hidden, and their superhuman strength. Punch, with their voluntary body modifications, declares themself the rebel of the group. Not surprisingly, they’re the one who questions Tony’s plan for the Anaheim mission. Later they remind Ivy not to idealize Tony—she must give herself credit for choosing to leave her “podunk little town” in Idaho. Everyone in the cell deserves that credit. Punch and Ivy, that is, and ZeroRaven and Minnie. Tony’s is the name Punch leaves out. They turn out to be right about him. Should the telepathic and empathic Minnie have sensed his deception, too? Maybe she did, and in collecting “brain-jars” she was making not only friends but a miniature strike force, should one be needed.

Tony aside, Ivy’s the normal member of the family, or “almost normal” as she puts it. Does she plume herself on this comparison, treating normality as a superior virtue? I don’t think so. I think that, for Ivy, abnormality is a good thing. Her mates are “lovely weirdos,” and they are her people.

One’s people can’t get much less homogeneous or indeed less anthropocentric than Ivy’s folks.

There’s another catchphrase, or catch-lyric, from the 1960s: All you need is love. In the end, what defeats Tony’s plot is love, or at least lust. Poor Tony. He planned to wield amplified pain and terror as the stimulants to jolt Cthulhu out of his dreams and send the Great One ravening for more such delight. Instead what Punch and Ivy delivered was tech-concentrated love. Or at least lust.

I guess we should be reassured that Cthulhu could prefer the bliss of wet dreaming in R’lyeh to stomping us human ants to so much sticky ick. At least for another eon or two, long enough for Nakamura’s chosen family to grow and thrive, brain-jars included.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Deep Ones are everywhere, and it’s at least occasionally possible to track down a wayward Mi-Go. But giant albino penguins? Those you don’t see every week. If only there were a freedom-fighting shoggoth, the team would be just-about perfect.

Really, the team is just about perfect anyway: I can’t resist a ragtag band of misfits trying to get by, get away from their pasts, and get their crushes to notice them. Or trying desperately to avoid their crushes noticing the unreasonable length of time for which they’ve been mooning, because it couldn’t possibly work out. Eighties X-Men vibes all the way!

Unlike in 80s X-Men comics, the queerness here is totally overt, with trans woman Ivy blushing over Punch in all their punk non-binary Deep One glory. Punch is eminently blushable, kicking cultist butt and standing up to Tony’s manipulation. And thinking very fast when they get a chance to save the world. Ants, as we know, can attract serious deific notice under the right circumstances.

My favorite, though, is Minnie, who gets massive points for—unlike the well-resourced main body of her species—giving her brains in jars mobility. Dormice with paper-clip legs! Birds in mini-drones! Chickens in teeny Baba Yaga houses! This is a dramatic improvement over being at the mercy of whoever’s leading the Azathoth Tour this week. I kinda wonder if she’s a kid, given that most Mi-Go are considerably bigger than crows; if so she’s awfully precocious with her engineering skills. Then again, maybe Mi-Go are born(?) as mechanical geniuses.

Beyond the mooning, I love seeing found family with varying abilities and vulnerabilities, taking care of each other in whatever individual ways they need. Some people (Minnie, Rogue) don’t like to be touched. Some people (ZeroRaven, Punch, Nightcrawler) need a place where they don’t have to pass as human-normal. It is, in fact, not too dissimilar from living in a big neurodiverse household with lots of people with disabilities and/or superpowers. (Where superpowers may include being able to make phone calls, recognize faces, and/or get a giant found family’s worth of food to fit in the fridge.)

My least favorite character, of course, is Tony, who combines the worst of several varieties of cult including Silicon Valley business-speak. I have, in fact, taken the Clifton Strengths test and I don’t do badly at adaptability. All the strengths have ways they can go bad, but I have to admit that my training didn’t include anything about them going this bad. Getting to see Tony punched by a giant albino penguin is very satisfying. Now do the other billionaire techbros.

I met Nakamura at a science fiction economics meeting, which is not the circumstance where you’d normally expect cosmic horror to come up as a conversational topic. But I asked about his writing, and he told me about this anthology, and I knew Cozy Cosmic had to be an instabuy. Cosmic horror has long been comfort reading for me—something about putting my problems in perspective—and I couldn’t resist the idea of stories that deliberately aim for that sweet spot of snuggling under the apocalyptic covers. I started with Nakamura’s own piece, but have been dipping in elsewhere since. I’m looking forward to one in particular that he mentioned, about making sourdough bread during the rise of the elder gods.

Next week, we head crossroads-ward in Chapters 19-20 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as r_emrys@wandering.shop, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post All You Need Is Love: Remy Nakamura’s “Wet Dreams in R’lyeh” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 17-18. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

The first time the alt-riders tried to reach the crossroads, they left Yale at sunset, planning to arrive at midnight. All they had to do, Sal said, was focus on the alt road and make their destination real in their minds: the place where they could fix things. In the morning they would come home, changed.

It almost worked out that way. “Worlds flickered around them like an optician’s lenses… The landscape cracked and fire flowed.” Centipede-bird things flew overhead, and Sal said they were almost there, and then Ish saw the crossroads infinitely far off in the sky, “twisted as a Mobius strip.” He thought the crossroads belonged to him, to all five of them. Then—sky and road cracked and spawned writhing shadows, and the shadows (or was it the crossroads?) asked, What do you want?

Ish just wanted it to stop.

Somehow they hitched back to the summit of East Rock Park, the Challenger smoking and running on shredded tires. Ramon bent his head to the steering wheel, weeping. Ish and Sarah clutched each other. Zelda, sick, staggered out of the car, Sal making way “with the precision of a satellite… each movement perfectly controlled because any slip, any mistake, would be disaster.” Eventually Ish managed, “It was waiting for us.”

Sal pointed to the sky. Behind it something moved and struck once, thunderously. It was “roiling and more massive than clouds, made of shades and swollen nothings.” In it, Ish saw the tiniest crack.

A shaken Zelda said, “It’s real.” To Sarah’s “So what the fuck do we do now?” Sal said: “We try again.”

* * *

Back to present story-time: In an alt as dry as a scooped-out eggshell, Ish falls asleep guarding Sarah and June’s tent. Waking, he bemoans his rusty road skills and worries about what to do with June, who still thinks “there were battles here to win.”

The sky gives a “bone-deep creak”—hairline fractures halo the stars. At the sky’s heart is “the absence that was Sal.”

Come daylight, the cracks remain, wriggling when viewed sidelong. The alt-riders walk toward distant hills, Ish longing for cover. He avoids looking at Sarah, because that makes him feel “something tight and sour underneath his heart.” She’s grown over the years, and she’s had the courage to marry. Whereas marriage for Ish seems a foreign concept—he fills his needs with as little risk as possible. Maybe Sarah’s right that June’s knack could be channeling rot. No power’s neutral, though: “Everything you used bound you.”

Ish’s own knack tells him that beyond the hills, people are dead and one man dying. When the others smell smoke, he’s forced to tell them. Sarah and June rush ahead anyway. They need water, supplies, transport. Nor can physician Sarah resist her need to heal. Ish follows through hillside pine scrub. Then he glimpses, and loses sight of, a white hat.

In the valley Sarah and June find a circle of high-tech prairie schooners, burned, and inside the circle dead men, women and children, also burned. Sarah recognizes their wagons and synthetic clothing from a post-apocalyptic world in which survivors view their former advanced technology as mythological, but can still use some of it due to deep-buried data centers and crude neural implants. She wonders how this group was displaced to their current alt. Apparently the road’s rules are changing on the road.

At camp center they find a man staked to the ground. From the metal plugs and wires in his skull, Sarah recognizes that he’s a data center-connected “teacher.” They also find four skeletal “horse-bots.” Sarah activates one and tells June they’ll be able to ride it. Ish arrives as she’s freeing the staked man, hoping to get him back to his own alt where he can reconnect with his data “voices.” The poor guy is like a lost phone, his moans dial tones, waiting for someone to pick up…

A phone… which was what the cowboy used in their own world to peer through the alts…

The dying man seizes Sarah’s throat, now wearing a white hat. Ish and June wrestle Sarah free. The other corpses rise, also white-hatted. Take the hat, the cowboy says, and earn salvation from a world coming apart. June feels the instability herself: beneath the cracking shell are shadow-creatures hungry for release.

Sarah and June mount one activated horse-bot. Ish mounts another. They escape the camp, but the cowboy-minions follow on black horses that look alive but cast no shadows. June reaches through the shell of the world to summon the shadow-creatures. They burst through the ground like barbed spider legs, destroying the cowboy-minions, and June feels with them their “free alien joy.”

Out of the dust billowing skyward, Sal’s shape emerges and reaches for June. June reaches back, falling upward, but Sarah holds her fast. The horse-bots charge onward. Then, “with a leap and a hitch,” the alt-riders are gone.

This Week’s Metrics

What’s Cyclopean: If East Rock in New Haven were to speak, it would do so “in tongues of continental divorce.” I’m just going to spend a while mooning over that sentence.

The Degenerate Dutch: The cowboy says it’s not supposed to be this easy for the strange, dark things to get in. “I can save you. Just put on the hat.” This is totally not a metaphor.

Libronomicon: Sarah has not, so far, written Annals of Shit I Wish I Hadn’t Seen, Volumes 1-5.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I’m beginning to think that Zelda and company don’t know as much about the nature of reality as they thought they did in college.

To be fair, if that wasn’t true, they would be even more inhuman figures of legend than they occasionally seem to each other. But because they kind of are figures of legend, the scale of their confusion may be itself legendary.

Backing up, my own resolved confusion this week was my assumption that they only went to the Crossroads once—the time that they lost Sal. “We try again” puts that in a whole different light (or a whole different shadow). They arrive the first time, they see the Crossroads “beautiful and strange, twisted as a Mobius strip” in the sky. “And then it went wrong.” But after the shadow-talons appear, the next thing we see is the gang skidding back into New Haven, nauseated and bloody and terrified.

What happened in between, we haven’t yet learned. Did the shadows try to keep them from the crossroads, fight them off with bloody teeth and claws? Or, faced with apparent horror beyond human imagination, did they shy away—and did the shadows try to keep them there? From Ish’s report, it seems like the latter: the shadows, which may also be the Crossroads, ask what he wants, and he begs them to “stop it” and let the gang go safely home.

Stories about crossroads deals are not, as a general rule, stories about haggling with a friendly clerk at the bodega. The crossroads is where you bargain with devils, where you trade your soul for your heart’s desire. In the happiest stories, it’s where you trick the forces of darkness and get the better end of the bargain. I don’t think our pulp adventurers thought through what they were looking for. I think they expected something as stereotypical as dinosaurs or cannibal biker gangs, red-skinned and horned and beatable at chess.

I’m beginning to think that instead of what they expected, they found exactly what they were looking for. And I think they told a story, afterwards, to convince themselves that they didn’t—that the shadow-rot stood between them and change, rather than being the change. Because here’s the thing: they didn’t know about the rot before that point. When they were just traveling apocalyptic alts, as far as I can tell, they blamed the destruction purely on bad decisions by humans. It’s only after the crossroads, when the shadows started to crack the sky of their own world, that they started thinking of it as the universal destroyer.

These were Yale students, taught to see change as something you make by being smart enough, rich enough, controlled enough, determined enough: all the coping strategies the gang tries in the post-Crossroads years. June, on the other hand, has been a street protestor fighting outside the system. She knows that change is messy and bloody and dangerous and sometimes incomprehensible—and she (perhaps like Sal) is the one who now sees potential in what the others think of as deadly corruption. “Monster possibilities curled around one another, like protesters kettled in until panic starts a mob”. Their “free alien joy” is perhaps not far off from what Cthulhu offers, the unchained potential that terrifies whoever’s currently on top.

The gang’s been thinking of the Cowboy as fundamentally similar to the rot, but he clearly isn’t. His bodies cast no shadow, repel anything strange or different. He has a clear age, a clear nature: an American dream 500 years old and all too human. And even people who seek change are shaped by the society that birthed them, frightened of losing the things it taught them to take for granted.

Maybe the alts died because they wouldn’t let change in. Maybe merely-human bad decisions must ultimately crystalize into a static, deadly story—like the Cowboy. In that case, the shadows that Zelda’s been fighting for a decade are doing exactly what she asked for in the first place. Or what Sal asked for, the only one who actually dared.

Now, is the change that the Crossroads bring good, from a human survival and sanity perspective, or is it even worse than alt-style crystalized-story catastrophe? That’s a whole ‘nother question.

Anne’s Commentary

I think that one “knack” the alt-riders unknowingly share must be immortality—how else can they have survived the shattered landscapes and violent encounters most every “hitch” drops them into? That, or one of the mysterious Powers That Be alt-side must be looking out for them. Make that one or more Powers—I count two major contenders for the title. There’s Team Black, represented by the Shadows and Rot. There’s Team White, represented by the Cowboy and his fellow White Hats. It’s the classic battle, Darkness Vs. Light, which universally boils down to Good Vs. Evil, doesn’t it?

Last Exit has been pleasurably provoking me with this question: Which of its dualities is which? The color black usually denotes evil, the color white good. Places that are shadowy inspire apprehension, because villains, predators and monsters may lurk there. Things that are rotten inspire disgust and the fear of contamination; if you rot, you must be dead, or worse, the living dead. Conversely, at least according to American folklore and pop culture, cowboys are good, the common man heroes at the heart of innumerable Westerns, along with their official counterpart the sheriff. A broader view of history—one including Native Americans and environmental repercussions—must take a far less idyllic view of East-West settlement. This broader view smudges up the White Hat for Gladstone’s central characters and many readers, making the Cowboy = Good Guy trope a complicated business.

A couple chapters back, Zelda and Ramon had to contend with a strongly Mad-Maxian alt. Chapter 18 sees Sarah, June and Ish stuck in a relatively safe counter-reality of unpeopled plains and modest hills. Does this mean Ish can contrast Sarah’s domestic bliss with his own solitary “efficiency” without getting interrupted? Can Sarah peacefully dwell on what Halloween costumes her kids will soon be wearing and that book her husband teases her to write? Forget about it. Yes, this alt is in itself bland, but our alt-riders aren’t the only ones who’ve dropped in. Beyond those hills are a whole wagon train of folks somehow whisked away from their native alt to give the place a strongly Western flavor.

And the wagon train has been circled, alas, to no avail.

Just by coincidence (or is it?), the original alt-riders once visited the displaced survivors’ world under less hectic circumstances than usual. They had time to sit a spell and study the locals, and so Sarah can explain to newbie June how their culture came to emulate not any old Western but a Western-SF mashup. Kind of Firefly meets Westworld. Pre-apocalypse, this particular alt had a technology featuring impressively advanced robotics and universal connection via a form of internet. Post-apocalypse, vast geothermally-powered data centers buried deep underground escaped the surface destruction, and remained accessible to survivors who had working neural implants. Sarah doesn’t know if everyone had implants previously. Only a few “teachers” had them afterwards, the tech passed down from teacher to teacher and affixed through presumably rather amateur and gruesome procedures, there being no microsurgeons left.

At the time of the alt-riders’ visit, the ruin of their world was far enough in the past for the survivors to view the technological highpoint not as history but myth. Still they scavenged and fixed what machines remained. Why these included souped-up prairie schooners and horse-bots, no survivors seemed to remember. Was the former high-tech society addicted to Old West LARPing on a grand scale? By chance, was some alt Westworld one of the few places to withstand catastrophe, making its artifacts the basis for the new society?

I like that idea in itself. The NeoWesterners’ specific function in Last Exit, however, is to supply the cowboy with a “phone” connection to the alt where Sarah, June and Ish have landed after escaping from the Best Western parking lot. This would argue that the cowboy tracked them to their (seemingly) random exit point. It being a barren place without tech, he had to transplant some at least mildly tech people there.

If the cowboy can toss people from alt to alt, why can’t he just toss a phone or phone equivalent there? Well, I guess he did toss a phone equivalent, in the wired-up “teacher,” but why bother to toss the whole wagon train? I don’t know. Neither does Sarah, who believes that the “rules” of the alts are changing. Could be she simply didn’t know all the rules. Could be the rules really are shifting.

The second possibility is the more disturbing. Even more disturbing would be that there are no rules to change. After all, couldn’t infinite alts mean infinite rules? And infinite complications to the alt-riders’ quest, such as what June may be becoming, like Sal before her.

Complications don’t have to be disastrous, do they? Ish sees the crossroads for the first time as “beautiful and strange, twisted as a Mobius strip,” no simple perpendicular intersection of two roads. Also beautiful and strange are how Sal saw the beyond she’s entered, and how June glimpses it now.

Could it be that complicated is the path to salvation?

That would be just like salvation.

Next week, Remy Nakamura’s “Wet Dreams in R’lyeh” offers ex-cultists, found family, and an unexpected chance to save the world (all PG-13 despite the title). You can find it in Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito and Mark Teppo’s The Cozy Cosmic anthology.[end-mark]

The post On a Horse With No Name: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 9) appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we cover Gemma Files’s “Grave Goods,” first published in the 2016 Autumn Cthulhu anthology. Spoilers ahead!

“It’s a boogeyman, so it has to do something gross. Like giants grinding bones to make their bread.”

As Aretha Howson fits bone chips together, they sing in a tone she feels more than hears, a frequency that “whispers in her ear at night, secret, liquid. Like blood through a shell.”

Aretha works with Drs. Elyse Lewin and Anne-Marie Begg of Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Through a miserably wet October, Lewin’s team has been investigating a site on Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nations land. The location’s remote and wild; the team had to cut a path through old growth conifers to reach their goal: a granite slab incised with petroglyphs atop a burial pit dated to 6500 B. P. (before the present). They’ve named it “Pandora’s Box.” A member of the local tribe, Begg has helped secure the elders’ permission to excavate.

The slab, it turns out, is also inscribed on its underside with “square-cut, coldly eyeless faces.” Begg calls the topside petroglyphs votive totems, but confesses they don’t resemble those she grew up with. Aretha speculates the topside may say “Keep out,” the underside “Stay in.”

A month into the dig, Aretha’s battling sinusitis as well as irritation with everyone except fellow intern Morgan. Lewin assembled an all-female team with the apparent belief that this exclusion of testosterone would guarantee harmony and cooperation. Nope: Begg and forensics expert Tatiana Huculak constantly battle over Huculak’s desire to send bone samples off-site for carbon-dating. Forget it, Begg says. The human remains must be returned to their resting places, as found. Huculak counters that she’s not sure the remains are human. Their pelvises are backslung like a bird’s, their spines articulated like a snake’s, their eyes set on the sides of their heads, their too-many teeth carnivore-pointed and -serrated. Maybe they’re looking at an “offshoot of humanity…some evolutionary dead end.” Debate deteriorates into what Begg calls “the black girl and the Indian, calling each other out as racists.” Lewin’s reminders that they’re all scientists, respectful professionals, have no lasting effect.

Aretha’s glad none of the team knows she’s trans. Paranoid, maybe, but there’s tension enough already. And puzzles, like why a family burial (one male, one female, one unsexed adolescent) should be exorbitantly blanketed with grave goods. Like why both skeletons and goods are coated with the red ochre that in ancient burials worldwide symbolized blood, propitiation, a warding-off of vampiric ghosts. Like why despite that reverent avalanche of grave goods, the skeletons’ faces were desecrated. She wonders too about the common practice, apparently absent here, in which the prominent dead were buried with sacrificed retainers.

One day, as light fades, Aretha feels driven back to the excavation. En route she overhears Begg on the sat-phone, arguing with an elder about Huculak’s suspicions. Begg doesn’t want to muddy their scientific undertaking with “mythology.” Aretha remembers the “fairy tales” Begg initially told them over the campfire. Her people don’t go where they’re now working, which is why it was a hiker who found the slab. Legend has it that Baykoks lingered here: skeletally thin creatures that shrilled in the night, killed warriors, and devoured their livers.

Aretha continues to the pit and scrapes obsessively at its walls. Morgan finds her and summons the others. Over their protests, Aretha digs on. Finally Begg realizes Aretha must’ve heard her earlier phone call. The Baykok’s folklore, she says. Aretha’s not going to find any separate larder of human bones. Aretha was thinking about retainer sacrifices, but there might be both. What about Huculak’s theory? What if a species coexisted here with humans and interbred, so modern humans might retain traces of the other species’ DNA?

Suddenly the pit wall collapses, spilling “roots and stones and bones, bones, bones” over Aretha. She was right, she deliriously thinks. “They’re here, we’re…(here).” And above her, behind her shocked team members, stands a tall, thin figure with burning side-set eyes. Its wail fills her mind: “(here, yes) (as we always have been) (as we always will)”

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Aretha awakes in the main tent, “hurt all over, inside and out,” a “furled agony-seed” in her lower abdomen. With Aretha’s clothes removed for first aid, the team’s discovered the scars from her gender reassignment surgery. Lewin’s incensed with the “misrepresentation,” but Morgan hotly defends Aretha. Begg and Huculak fall into their old argument. Huculak brandishes a freshly uncovered human bone which still has unmummified flesh on it. Morgan insists on hiking down-trail to find a sat-phone connection and call in medical help for Aretha. She kisses Aretha and whispers that she’ll see her soon, but the voice in Aretha’s mind hisses “I—(we)—think not.”

Aretha drifts off. She wakes to lessened pain and goes out into a blessedly rainless night, where Lewin, Begg, and Huculak huddle around a Coleman stove. Morgan has been gone two or three hours. Five minutes down the trail, Begg finds tracks, which all go to see. Each narrow print wells with blood and is, by human standards, backwards. Begg recalls legends about the Baykok: how at first they used humans for food, then slaves, then breeding stock. “Sometimes,” she allows to Huculak, “a monster isn’t a metaphor for prejudice… Sometimes it’s just a monster.”

That tone, “like blood through some fossilized shell,” again thrums through Aretha, drawing nearer. She sinks down, hears Lewin call out Morgan’s name. But it’s not Morgan who approaches. It’s her skin, held “like an early Hallowe’en mask” before a skeletal shadow flanked by others “making their stealthy, back-footed way towards them all.” Aretha’s inner voice whispers that “this darkness is yours as much as ours…passed down…from our common ancestors…”

Every grave is our own is Aretha’s last thought. The earth opens and she falls, wondering who will eventually find her bones, who will hear their songs, how long this time “before anyone stops to listen.”

What’s Cyclopean: The piercing cry of the baykok is “shell-bell, blood-hiss. Words made flesh, at long last.”

Libronomicon: Sure Heinrich Schliemann used The Iliad as a guidebook to find Troy—or something that could be called Troy—but that doesn’t mean that old epics are usually the best way to pick archaeological sites.

The Degenerate Dutch: Huculak says some deeply rude things about Begg’s insistence on protecting ancestral (or not-so-ancestral) bones, and about indigenous people generally. Lewin is an ass when Aretha is revealed to be transgender, and gets appropriately shouted down. Also it turns out that making an expedition all-female does not actually prevent conflict.

Weirdbuilding: Some of the stories feeding into weird fiction are very, very old.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

One of the most traditional horror stories is about what happens if you stray past the light of the campfire, or break binding social norms. Don’t go out thataway, there are monsters (maybe tigers, maybe dragons). Be polite to strangers on the road, they might punish rudeness (with a sword, with magic). And don’t mess with the dead.

As we’ve become more prone to messing with the dead—because they’re someone else’s ancestors and we’re curious, or because they’re buried with ancient jewels, or because medical research requires—the stories have expanded to gloss our nervousness. Doctors Frankenstein and West need corpses to control the stuff of life, and pyramids are surely full of both treasure (not actually yours) and curses (as many as you can carry). As for the trope-standard “Indian burial ground,” well. European-descended North American cultures are maybe not entirely reconciled to living on the bones of apocalypse.

Files’s archaeologists do have advantages over Indiana Jones. They’re actually checking with the original keepers of the land, for a start, even taking a representative along. They’re more interested in proper scientific procedure than treasure. They plan to treat the dead with respect.

No matter who you are—no matter how respectful you are of what you think you’re dealing with—you dismiss the old stories at your peril.

We’ve read several stories about a prejudiced jerk who ultimately gets eaten by a grue, or occasionally and unfortunately who gets the grue to eat others. This one is more interesting: a group of people with strong opinions and intersecting marginalities, who fail just badly enough at listening to stories—their own and others’—to fall prey to the grue whose bones they’re trying to study. None of them are irredeemable jerks, even Huculak with her anger at indigenous restrictions on disinterment or Lewin with her TERFy tendencies. Put them in a warm room with hot tea, and they could probably work out their differences or at least discuss them with less swearing—but they’re not going to get that chance.

The closest any of them come to taking the Baykok story seriously, before the end, is calling the slab “Pandora’s Box.” They half-joke about symbols reading “keep out” and “stay in,” but they aren’t listening to themselves. They’re scientists, after all, and part of science is looking for the evidence in front of you rather than believing stories. If you’re in the wrong sort of story, though, you’ll find more of that evidence than you can handle.

I love that amid all this, they are scientists. They care passionately and sometimes exasperatingly about research methods. They talk in citations and references and comparisons, debating the similarities and differences between baykoks and wendigos, making inferences based on the cross-cultural frequency of retainer sacrifice. They trace etymology and the genetics of the genus Homo. They point out that giants could grind your bones to make flatbread but not anything that has to rise. I hate when narratives treat scientists as idiots for being themselves in the face of genre threats (looking at Michael Chrichton here); here the mismatch between curiosity and imminent grue seems more tragedy than judgment.

I do have to admit that I spent the whole story wanting to hug Aretha and make her go lie down. It’s possible that some things would’ve worked out better if she’d been sent home on her first day of fever, or at least that Morgan wouldn’t have gotten eaten first. Or that they would’ve gotten to kiss? Maybe? Unfortunately, I suspect something would’ve woken the baykoks anyway, and no one here seems like an obvious Final Girl with a chance at survival. Perhaps Aretha would’ve gotten some painkillers for the whole ordeal, at least. The line that made me squirm the most was the description of her “world’s worst yeast infection,” which is presumably imminent grue possession, but ow. Ow ow ow. I’ve never had my liver torn out and am just fine with avoiding it, but that’s the bit I can imagine all too easily.

Anne’s Commentary

Weird fiction wisdom holds that if the native or local people do not go to a certain place, your band of explorers or research scientists or adventure vacationers should not go there either. Invariably, the outsiders ignore this red flag. Invariably, it’s because native and local people are the dupes of legend, superstition or wrong-headed custom. Scooby-Doo variation: The natives and locals are making up monsters to scare outsiders off from some resource, treasure or evidence of nefarious deeds. Scooby-Doo variations aside, the natives and locals are always right, and at least some of the outsiders pay the ultimate price for their hubris.

In “Grave Goods,” Files gives us a character straddling the divide between natives and outsiders. Begg belongs to the tribe whose members avoid legendary Baykok territory, but she’s also an outside-trained scientist. In the end she admits that she knew about the Baykoks; she just didn’t want to believe the stories were true, even after Huculak found evidence that there might be something to them. Sciency evidence, you know, like bone and teeth structures more avian and reptilian than human. Oh, Science, you double-edged scalpel, you pusher of carbon-dating and DNA analysis that must finally drive us mad or into the comfortable ignorance of a new dark age!

Because who really wants to know where we came from, if we came from there too recently, anyhow? It’s one thing to picture evolutionary change occurring over millions of years, phylogenetic trees putting out branches and twigs and twiglets far more slowly than any actual plant. It’s another to think of Baykoks and humans interbreeding only about 6500 years ago, to produce an Aretha Howson in the present day: Someone entirely human from the looks of it, but hiding the Baykok within flesh, cartilage, and bone that resonate to its kins’ monstrous voices.

That’s assuming, of course, that there are monsters and not just differences individual to individual, race to race, species to species and on up the taxonomic hierarchy. I think everyone on Lewin’s team would have agreed pre-expedition that it’s prejudice that creates monsters, justifying one’s fear of particular others by demonizing them. Begg’s terrified realization is that “sometimes a monster isn’t a metaphor for prejudice at all, plus or minus power. Sometimes it’s just a monster.”

We’re not sure exactly what Lewin meant to accomplish by selecting only women for the Pandora’s Box project. Aretha deduces from the professor’s initial pitch that Lewin genuinely believed an all-female team would guarantee an operation free from “ambition, wrath, or lust,” a “paradisiacal meeting of hearts and minds.” But as Aretha’s aunties used to say, “Just ‘cause they ain’t no peckers don’t mean ain’t no peckin’ order.” The clash between Begg and Huculak is based on legitimately incompatible agendas. That doesn’t stop them from peppering their arguments for and against bone analysis with racial innuendoes and even slurs. Lewin flutters at such unprofessional (and unsisterly) behavior, but when Aretha’s transgender status is exposed, so too are Lewin’s biases.

Since such relatively minor differences are enough to shatter the harmony of the expedition, it’s a good thing no one has a chance to appreciate Aretha’s kinship with the Baykoks, who are to her not a “them” but a “we.”

Which brings up the question I often ask myself: Self, why in weird fiction do so many nonhuman intelligences want to interbreed with humans? And how can they even do so, given the substantial genetic differences between the species? Fantasy can fall back on magic, I suppose, science fiction on technology. Files’s scientists mention interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo habilis, but these two groups must be much more closely related than humans and Baykoks. From the skeletons Lewin’s team unearths, the Baykoks sound like a reptilian-avian mashup. That suggests dinosaurs to me, since among the reptiles are dinosaurs and among the dinosaurs are birds. What if some dinosaur line survived to alter through convergent evolution into a vaguely anthropomorphic form? That would still leave Baykoks and humans too distantly related for interbreeding, wouldn’t it?

Never mind my overthinking. Baykoks, like all “reptile-people,” are cool creations. Maybe they’re related to the “Nameless City” serpents? And maybe that “adolescent” skeleton found under Pandora’s Box, with its “missing” pelvis, was a more ophidian form of Baykok? Or a visiting relative from the Arabian desert?

I’ll stop now, I swear.

Next week, we face the cracks in the sky in Chapters 17-18 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as r_emrys@wandering.shop, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post Monsters Sans Metaphor: Gemma Files’ “Grave Goods” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 15-16. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

June hitched out of the hotel parking lot grasping Zelda’s hand, but she’s landed alone atop a grass-encircled hill. Overhead, the stars are “so deep, so dense, so different,” but the earth stretches away in empty darkness. She’s read that when you’re lost, you should wait to be found, but that assumes your companions aren’t also lost. Zelda said if separated to make for the Medicine Wheel, where worlds touch. Head south and west. It will call you.

June descends the hill. She’s hitched only once, while Zelda and her friends have done it hundreds of times. She’s been among them as a guest, Zelda’s student, Sal’s little cousin. But Zelda’s accepted her. Zelda’s the one who never left the road. Maybe the darkness has gotten Sal, but at least Sal didn’t flinch, and June won’t either.

She knows enough not to focus inward when trying for spin. The mind’s a prison of preconceptions. Focus outward at the world: don’t know what you’ll see beforehand, and the world will lead you somewhere unexpected.

Where it leads June is into intensifying moonlight, grass bobbing in multicolored waves. She thinks the shadows must soon fade, then realizes no amount of light can banish them. The shadows hold secrets. When she reaches for them, they reach back, and she hears distant music and voices. The shadows ask what she wants. She answers that she wants to be taken to her friends. Darkness enfolds her. She slips through it from alt to alt, shadows urging her ever further. As worlds shift, however, she hears Sarah’s voice, glimpses her and Ish far away and small. Her hand parts the barrier, and Sarah says, “Sal?”

June’s voice is crashing waves and screams. Her outstretched hand drips wriggling shadows. Ish attacks her; she grabs his arm with shadowy claws that score him deep, then reverts to herself. Ish apologizes, but says that when June entered their alt, she was covered with rot, waving too many arms. Like Sal.

They debate whether June’s “knack” might involve using the rot for her own purposes instead of the rot using her. Ish is skeptical. Sarah says that their knacks are shaped by what each alt-rider needs, what they want. June admits she wants Sal back. That’s what Ish was afraid of.

June and Sarah bed down while Ish stands watch. June asks for the story of how the friends set off for the crossroads. Sarah explains how they combined math and magic and their “young and eager faith” to start a journey that would change the world around them. In the end, they failed.

* * *

As Ramon and Zelda rest on a ruined rooftop, he contemplates how the friends came together at Yale. Fate or chance? A necessary gravitation? He remembers standing on the highest tower on campus with Sal—Sal always loved heights—and talking about her relationship with Zelda. He advised Sal to admit that she too was worried about not fitting in, that they were both fallible but having each other might be enough. He recalls teaching Zelda to drive the Challenger, and how one day she took a turn that didn’t exist into a world of dinosaurs.

They walk toward the camp they spotted earlier, hoping to steal a vehicle. Ten miles there, ten years apart to talk over. Zelda admits that she doesn’t always succeed in destroying rot and healing inter-alt rifts. When she fails, people disappear, even whole towns. Ramon talks about his struggle with drugs, his escape from corporate America, meeting Gabe. At last Zelda asks the burning question: “You don’t hate me?” Ramon had expected to hate her, after the crossroads catastrophe, but he answers: “Of course not. You showed me my first dinosaur.”

Ramon suggests they simply ask the camp inhabitants if they can borrow a car. Zelda doesn’t argue—sooner or later Ramon will remember how things work out in the alts. A closer look at the tank traps and staked skulls ringing the huts rules out civility, as do perimeter guards whose mouths have been stitched shut. After nightfall, the encampment quiets down, but the skulls’ eye-sockets glow red as they rotate like magical security cameras.

Ramon’s knack for finding safe passage gets them into the camp unseen. Zelda’s knack complements his by “sliding chance into more comfortable paths.” They find grotesquely modified motorbikes and a gigantic “Frankencar” welded together from trucks, tanks, even a missile platform. A corpse lies on an altar by the dying bonfire. Next to it, battered and blood-splashed, stands the Challenger. Ramon forgets stealth in hurrying toward his car, and a neo-barbarian sounds the alarm.

Luckily for Ramon and Zelda, the Challenger runs a lot better than it looks. Guards pursue on “buzz-saw bikes” along with a bloody-mouthed priest aboard the Frankencar. Zelda hitches into a new alt where the road runs through lava fields, but they’ve drawn their pursuers along with them. The bikes meet fiery ends. The Frankencar bears down, inexorable.

Because things couldn’t possibly get worse, beyond-Sal appears as a pillar of black cloud trailing lava-storms like a “bridal train.” Zelda grabs the steering wheel and sends the Challenger off the road. Instead of splashing into magma, it drops into a parking lot dotted with human-shaped algae blobs. No one’s followed them, and they’re alive and laughing with reaction. They’re no longer young, “bound for a good war,” but they’re still here.

Then Zelda spots thin black lines bisecting stars and moon. There are cracks in the sky, again.

This Week’s Metrics

What’s Cyclopean: June complains about Zelda’s tendency to explain alt-travel in weird metaphors. She’s also the one who compares the voices of shadows to a glass harmonica. Zelda, in a less-than-poetic moment, suggests her rot-fixing is like a plumber repairing her own effluent-storm of broken pipes.

Libronomicon: Zelda, getting back into the swing of alt-travel in company, tells herself that the separated party is “only temporarily inconvenienced, like people on adventures in books.” Very meta.

Weirdbuilding: June compares alt-travel—the need to look outward for uncertainty—to literary “Jedi stuff” magic that requires you to become more sure, more inward-focused.

Anne’s Commentary

I’ve never been a fan of the Mad Max movies or of similar post-apocalyptic SFF in which the tattered remnants of humanity belong to two groups: Neo-barbarians obsessed with automotive mayhem and power-tool weapons; and their victims/occasional saviors (also usually equipped for automotive and power-tool mayhem.) One or more of Gladstone’s alt-riders must be big-time into the franchise, though. That’s assuming their imaginations play a part in the alts they “hitch” into, many of which would make the ultimate destination for Wasteland Weekend.

Or, still more depressing, the number of Maxian alts may indicate that humanity has a real propensity under existential stress to deteriorate into rusty, clanking, gas-guzzling savagery. What it will come to when the fossil fuels and leather-bearing animals are gone… well, there must be alts expressing all the dusty-gory possibilities.

Mustn’t forget, though. Another frequent stop for the alt-riders is a world populated by dinosaurs. I guess that here the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event of 66 million years ago never took place and so the dinosaurs didn’t surrender dominance to mere rodents and their descendants. It’s the rare positive alt-outcome. Who wouldn’t prefer dodging Triceratops to Frankencars? Ramon can forgive Zelda all her sins because she took him to Cretaceous Park as well as to Security Cam Skulls Land.

(Security Cam Skulls are cool, though. I would buy one, or a dozen. On the other hand, the guards with stitched-up lips bother me. How do they eat, or brush their teeth, or expectorate forcefully to show their contempt for the good guys? The evil overlord of this gang obviously hasn’t thought things through.)

I’m starting to like June best of this book’s characters. By separating her from the other alt-riders, Chapter Fifteen drops the POV spotlight squarely on her, and she proves more than capable of owning it. As June sees it, she doesn’t have the others’ experience with the road, but “her whole life had been off the map,” which “had to count for something.” It’s given her impressive maturity, both in practical agency and more abstract thinking. She can admire Zelda for sticking to the road, keeping faith with her convictions while her friends deserted. She can admire Sal, however fallen, for having had the guts to go “out beyond the edge of the firelight circle, where people were changed.” But she also realizes the potential cost of change that radical. People thought they wanted God to speak to them, but those who really heard God’s Word “were broken open and pulped by the Word…anything that wouldn’t pulp you wasn’t the Word.” And so you could pray, “God, save me from God.” You could want the mystical agony-ecstasy of being burned, but fear consumption. You could want to stick to the symbolism of sacrifice, the sacrament, rather than sacrifice itself, to “stay a sturdy little wafer, a cup of too-sweet wine.”

Or you could accept that your personal process for alt-travel required stepping into the darkness beyond the light. Instead of waiting for the shadows to yield to light, you could reach for them, for every “moonshadow” that “twitched, uncurled, lengthened, put off new shoots as whip thin as centipede legs.” You could slip through shadow “like a fish through a stream,” and, instead of going “just a little further” as the shadows tempted, you could step out among the friends you sought.

Too bad the friends would mistake you for the beyond-Sal they’ve come to fear, because you too emerge wearing black rot, sporting too many arms, your face “darkness straight through. Like the night was moving.”

Sarah can entertain the idea that using “rot” (“shadow” to June) could be the girl’s unique knack, shaped like all their knacks by what she most wants and needs. Ish is skeptical—what could June want that “rot” can provide? June tells him the truth: She wants Sal back. And, as June later tells herself, she wants to save them all, Sal and Zelda, Sarah and Ramon and Ish.

No, not wants to save. June’s “gonna save them all.”

There’s a mission worthy of a cosmic-level Jeanne d’Arc! I’ve got to love June for embracing it, and I’ve got to be terribly afraid for her at the same time.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Mad Max races across lava fields don’t sound like my idea of a good time, but clearly Ivy League students are different. June gets the appeal, though: “monsters you could fight and sometimes beat”. The alts are full of pulp-trope apocalypses that tie up neatly—until they aren’t.

Neil Gaiman has a quote: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” Zelda and company, though, have learned the difference between “can” and “will”, between “sometimes” and “inevitably”. June knows that lesson well, but is jealous of the illusion—however tenuous and temporary. It may be the only thing “better” about the worlds they’ve found.

At least part of alt-travel depends on what you believe possible, or rather on what you don’t believe is impossible. Have they found only monster-ful worlds where monsters can be beaten because that’s the limit of their optimism? Because they imagined overcoming villains rather than imagining what an actual better world might look like? Or were these alts always there to find, horrific possibilities slipping through into the imaginations of B-movie producers throughout the 20^th century?

June, out on her own, does something that Ish and Sarah thought impossible: she works with the rot without—it seems—becoming permanently corrupted. The inevitable cordyceps metaphor comes up. But while parasitic mind-control fungus is real, so are mycelial networks that break down the dead and turn them into mulch for new life, that carry nutrients and information across forests. And those networks may sprout fruiting bodies (that’s the mushroom part) that look slimy, disturbing… rotten.

So which of those describes the rot, really? It feels like June has just learned something important, but it’s not clear what.

Ramon recalls commiserating with Zelda about being a first-generation college student, not knowing what it’s possible to ask for. Getting an extension feels like a cheat code, wild as moving between universes. But for alt-travel they’re all first-generation students, unclear even after their initial travels what possibilities lie open to them. June’s discovery doesn’t come with a convenient professor to explain the boundaries.

June complains that Zelda describes alt-travel with “weird metaphors,” but they all do that. Magic or math or science, discovery of what’s already out there or shaped by belief—they don’t know. And not understanding the multiverse—that’s tangled with how little they understand about their own world, about themselves, about each other. Sal, young and “fronting” the world with the appearance of confidence, has “more fronts than the Second World War.” There’s so much carried by that pun. Sal’s facades create a battle front with every obstacle in her way; Sal-as-student wants contacts who can provide all the keys to all the front (and back) doors; Sal-as-rot creates “fronts” through the million cracks in the world. And June takes after her: her insomnia is “a flipbooks of crisis,” all the fronts that require action. All the ways the world requires saving.

Alt-travel requires uncertainty, and that can make it feel like uncertainty is the only thing that’s real. Ramon wrestles with this: the Challenger’s claim that only the grit and blood of the road are real, his love and comfort with Gabe mere surface illusion. This comes right after a long section about how Zelda an Sal needed to acknowledge their love—their mutual small-lost-person humanity—over their need to put each other on heroic pedestals. It never happens in their college years: Zelda needs Sal big as the sky, and that’s what she gets.

Maybe they can’t find “better” until they take the grit and blood of adventure down from their pedestals. Until they allow the good parts—even if less adrenaline-charged than a Mad Max car chase—to be real too.

Next week we celebrate the turning season with a selection from Autumn Cthulhu: Gemma Files’s “Grave Goods”.[end-mark]

The post I Am No Jedi: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 8) appeared first on Reactor.

This week is our 450^th post, and by tradition we’re watching the weird: Jordan Peel’s 2017 writer-director debut Get Out. Spoilers ahead!

“The Armitages are so good to us. They treat us like family.”

Night, an affluent suburb. A Black man walks along, talking via phone to “baby.” A white sports car makes a U-turn to trail him. Spooked, he doubles back, but the driver knocks him out and shoves him into the car trunk.

Day, an urban apartment decorated with photographs. Chris Washington, a young Black man, is the photographer. His white girlfriend Rose Armitage arrives. He asks if her parents, whom they’re about to visit, know Chris is Black. Rose says no, but don’t worry, they’re not racist. Not that she’s dated a Black man before.

Rose drives Chris through woods. Chris, who’s supposedly quitting, lights a cigarette. A deer darts directly in front of their car, slams into the grille. They pull over, shaken. Hearing moans, Chris finds the doe dying. A policeman answers Rose’s call, but just demands Chris’s driver’s license. Rose confronts the policeman, who desists. Chris tells her that was “hot.” Well, Rose says, she’s not letting anyone mess with her man.

The Armitages live on a secluded estate tended by groundskeeper Walter and maid Georgina, both Black. Rose’s father Dean is a neurosurgeon, mother Missy a psychiatrist. They receive Chris with hugs, but Dean embarrasses with too-pointedly antiracist remarks. Missy draws from Chris that his father was absent, and his mother died in a hit-and-run when he was eleven. Missy offers to cure Chris’s smoking habit with hypnotherapy. Chris declines.

Rose’s brother Jeremy arrives, manic and boozy. After informing Chris that with his “genetics” he’d be a “beast” of a mixed-martial-arts fighter, Jeremy proposes demonstrating his own skills. Prevented, he sulks off.

Tomorrow the Armitages throw their annual party in honor of the late Grandpa, a very-white affair. In their bedroom, Rose apologizes about her family’s behavior. Chris shrugs. Later he sneaks outside to smoke and is startled when Walter sprints at him like a charging rhino, to veer off at the last second.

Back inside he’s startled by Missy, who invites him into her study. She reintroduces hypnosis. Chris, who imagines she’d use a swinging watch, misses her actual focus: the continual stirring of her tea. Missy makes him relive how, the night his mother died, he sat watching TV—frozen by denial—instead of reporting her absence. (Later we’ll learn his mother lived for hours, so he might have saved her by summoning help.) Missy taps her cup three times to send Chris into “the sunken place,” trapping him in the darkness of his subconscious.

Next morning Walter, automaton-stiff and disturbingly cheerful, apologizes for scaring Chris. Georgina, when she apologizes for accidentally knocking his phone off-charger, is similarly stilted. The too-friendly party guests further unnerve Chris, as do their remarks on his looks, strength, and supposed sexual prowess. He’s relieved to see one Black man, until the guy responds awkwardly (kinda like an old white guy) to his friendly greeting. Even so, this guest looks familiar. Chris also meets blind gallery owner Jim Hudson, who “sees” art through an assistant and admires Chris’s photography.

Chris phones his dog-sitter and friend Rod, a TSA officer. Rod warned Chris not to visit Rose’s parents: His pet theory is that white people turn Blacks into sex slaves. Chris tries to get a discreet photo of the Black guest, but the flash bewilders the man, who suddenly comes alive and shouts at Chris to get out. The Armitages usher him off. Dean claims the man had a seizure. Then Rod identifies the Black guest as a musician named Andre who disappeared recently. Chris pulls Rose aside: He wants to leave now. She agrees.

Meanwhile, a blown-up photo of Chris beside him, Dean conducts a “bingo game” that’s really a silent auction. Jim Hudson has the highest bid.

While packing, Chris discovers photos in Rose’s closet. Many show her snuggled with a series of Black men. One’s Walter, and the only woman is Georgina. He hustles Rose downstairs. The Armitages block their escape. Chris keeps yelling for Rose’s supposedly-missing car keys. She makes a show of looking for them, then admits that of course she can’t help him leave. Missy gives a glass three spoon-taps, sending Chris into the Sunken Place.

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Chris wakes strapped to an armchair. A TV plays a video of Roman Armitage, Dean’s father, who talks about some immortality scheme called “Coagula.” Jim Hudson’s next by live-stream; he explains that Dean’s perfected a brain-transfer procedure. He’s transplanted many “white” brains into physically superior Black bodies, and so Jim will acquire Chris’s “eye” for photography! Chris will persist only in his remaining stem brain, a conscious but helpless ghost.

Televised spoon-taps incapacitate Chris again. Back in the city, Rod calls Chris’s phone and gets Rose, who says Chris left in a cab two days before. When her concern turns to flirtation, Rod realizes she’s the enemy. He begs the police to investigate the Armitage “sex-slave” ring, but they laugh him off.

Dean preps Jim. Jeremy goes to retrieve Chris. But Chris has dug cotton stuffing from the chair arms and blocked his ears from Missy’s taps. He knocks Jeremy out, and impales Dean on deer antlers from the wall, leaving Jim with brain open and fire spreading in the operating theater. Missy attacks Chris with a dagger he turns against her. At the front door Jeremy grapples him, but Chris breaks free and crushes Jeremy’s skull.

Meanwhile Rose lounges in her room, earbuds in place, perusing the internet for handsome Black men.

Outside, Chris commandeers Jeremy’s sportscar. Peeling off, he hits Georgina. He puts her in the passenger seat—from which she attacks him, having been Dean’s transplanted mother all along. The car crashes, killing Georgina. The noise alerts Rose, who comes out with a rifle. As Chris dodges bullets, Walter rockets up, Rose yelling, “Get him, Grandpa!” Walter, then, is actually Roman. He tackles Chris, who uses his phone flash to revert Walter as he inadvertently reverted Andre. Walter takes Rose’s rifle to “finish off” Chris. Instead he shoots Rose, then himself.

Rose lies bleeding. Chris tries to strangle her but can’t bear to. A siren-blasting car pulls up, and Rose yells for help. But the car’s a TSA vehicle, the driver Rod! He drives Chris away while Rose dies, saying “Man, I told you not to go in that house!”

Exhausted, Chris has no smart comeback.

The Degenerate Dutch: It’s such a privilege to be able to experience someone else’s culture. Black is fashionable, don’t you know? I would vote for Obama a third time if I could, my man.

Weirdbuilding: Tell us again about these rich white people running a sex slave ring. Please? Don’t say I never do anything for you! (Poor Rod, he’s almost got the right genre savvy.)

Madness Takes Its Toll: Let’s do some hypnosis to help you with that nicotine addiction.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I can’t be the only introvert terrified by the unlikely notion that everyone at a party is secretly judging me. It only gets worse if everyone else already knows each other, or if they have something in common that makes me stand out…

So even before we get to the body-snatching, Chris is in an absolute nightmare of a situation. The constant flow of white people trying to sound not-racist and failing spectacularly, the weird questions about his fighting and golfing abilities, the Stepford servants with their fake smiles and late-night murderous jogs, help no things. I 100% screamed at one point when Georgina suddenly turned to look at him.

This is Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, and both brilliance and first-movie problems are visible. I recognized the uncanny-valley aesthetic of the white characters from the later Lovecraft Country: These are people for whom a veneer of Niceness is vital, for whom “authentic” is an impossible horror. They can’t show their true selves because that would be gauche, and also because then they’d be being rude to the people they’re about to mind-control, body-snatch, etc. But Misha Greene brought some much-needed perspective to Lovecraft Country; Get Out is almost entirely lacking in sympathetic women, and real-Georgina gets only the briefest of moments on-screen even as real-Andre gets to both deliver a warning and save the day.

That’s probably my biggest problem with an otherwise brilliant movie, although I will admit to several moans of “That’s not how hypnosis works!” (For the record, being hypnotized is a skill and requires the cooperation of the subject—and won’t work if the subject lacks the skill in question. Which I say as someone who completely sucks at it.) I realize we’re in Mi-Go land here, which also didn’t prevent me from side-eyeing the neuroscience. (Don’t cut the one guy open before the other is even there—there are all sorts of possible delays that have nothing to do with your victim waking up and killing people! Keep a sterile field! Personality is not preserved in the hindbrain!)

Ahem. No, really, this is Mi-Go magical neurosurgery, where brains can be moved from place to place at will and minds seem to hang out wherever is least convenient. Behold the Coagula!

Like I said, brilliant movie. The Coagula demo video is a particularly Nice touch, mirroring perfectly a certain type of “we’re all family here” small business aesthetic, all justified by the explanation that the procedure works so much better with a gloating infodumpy monologue. A very polite monologue, of course. We couldn’t possibly be rude.

I’m deeply torn about the ending. The rest of the movie so perfectly gets its creep from implication, from smile-masked monsters and little moments of sheer wrongness—and then everything gets resolved by bloody violence. The change of tone is jarring and, at least for me, reduced both the scare factor and any cathartic satisfaction dramatically. But I also suspect there’s commentary intended: that those smiles mask violence much worse and bloodier than anything Chris does, and that people with privilege get credit for their façades while those without are blamed for even the most necessary self-defense. That works for me on an intellectual level, not so much on a horror movie level.

I also wonder whether we’re supposed to worry about what happens next. Thanks to Rod’s noble effort with the authorities, Chris is firmly placed at the Armitage house, and presumably those detectives will soon be investigating the slaughter in question. And Chris’s fingerprints are on everything that hasn’t caught fire—Rose’s neck, for example. I fear that he’s going to suffer precisely the mundane horrors one would expect, and maybe I’m supposed to think about how many loose threads horror movies tend to leave dangling and how likely cops are to accept a white Final Girl’s tenuous excuses. But maybe I’m supposed to accept Rod’s promise that things are “handled”.

There’s a reason they say that real friends help you hide bodies.

Anne’s Commentary

In both print and visual media, the horror story often begins with a prologue in which a minor character meets the monster, their death or disappearance ensuing. This opening scene assures the horror consumer that they’ve indeed come to the right place. Bad things are going to happen here, things with extreme consequences. And what’s more, what’s critical: In whatever human or animal or fantastic form they take, within the confines of this entertainment, the monsters are real.

Scary enough, right? But not too scary if readers or viewers can keep the monsters within those confines, those fiction-cages, telling themselves it’s all make believe, make-up and special effects—at base, some creators exercising their morbid imaginations so we don’t have to. There’s nothing wrong with a good cheap thrill. Stick with that, and you’ll sleep fine.

What you’ve got to avoid is the good deep thrill. That’s the kind that produces the creeping dreads and shooting terrors of recognition and conviction. Confronted with deeply thrilling work, we know we’ve seen these monsters before, and we know they’re really real. They could be living beside us. They could be living inside us.

Inside us is the worst, because it poses the question of whether the real monsters are parasites or integral tissue, not even cancers but the purest expression of our too-too impure selves. Even the Armitages and their cronies admit that no one racial constitution is perfect. The whites may get the Intellectually Superior Genes, but the Blacks get the Physically Superior ones. So, barring a technique for precise genetic manipulation, the only way to create a genuine master race would be to put white brains in Black bodies. Hitler didn’t learn this lesson from Jesse Owens’s triumphs over Aryans, but Roman Armitage did. He almost got over losing his Olympic berth to Owens, as Dean tells Chris. I’m assuming that though he never shook his resentment, he did acknowledge one Black man’s advantage over him with the sincerest form of admiration he could muster. Not emulation, but—

Envy, in its most larcenous incarnation. Chris’s buddy Rod believes white people want to make sex slaves out of Blacks; that’s the worst thing he can think of. Rod is too innocent to conceive the truth, that Armitages don’t merely want to use Black bodies, but to subsume them. “Welcome to the Coagula,” video-Roman tells Chris. In medical terminology a coagulo is soft or liquid matter that’s solidified, as in a blood clot. Coagula appears in the famous phrase from alchemy: Solve et Coagula, to dissolve and congeal, to lose and restore form, the basis process of alchemical transformation: what, of the base into the precious, the black into the white? Roman would like Dean’s Black subjects to think they’re joining the family. He doesn’t mention that they’ll be the family members locked in the psychic basements of the Sunken Place, a more terrible situation than any Gothic madwoman’s because absolute loss of agency is coupled with perpetual consciousness of that loss.

There’s a strong punitive element to the transplantation process that I’m sure Roman couldn’t help but relish.

Fear breeds phobias and paranoias; phobias and paranoias spawn much classic horror. Nor are phobias baseless: Heights can kill you if you fall from them, spiders or snakes if they’re highly venomous. Paranoids aren’t always wrong: Occasionally, people are out to get them.  And what the unaffected might label paranoia can be reasonable fear for the usual targets. We’re back to the opening scene of Get Out. Andre is anxious about being in a largely white enclave to begin with. His anxiety skyrockets when that sportscar circles back. Why not, in a world where neighborhood patrols plus Black teenagers dangerously armed with bags of Skittles can end up with the teenager dead? Because this is a horror movie, the more prosaic racist becomes a grotesque, a Ninja-stealthy jump-scaring dark knight complete with visored helmet. It’s really Jeremy in disguise, but we won’t know that until later.

If when the helmet came off, the knight showed a skull’s face, we’d get that cheap thrill mentioned above. Because he shows a human face, we get a deep thrill.

We recognize that monsters are real.

Next week, we the party remains split in Chapters 15-16 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as r_emrys@wandering.shop, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post I Told You Not to Go in That House: Jordan Peele’s Get Out appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we cover Mari Ness’s “The Girl and the House,” first published in the April 2019 issue of Nightmare Magazine. Spoilers ahead!

“She cannot—will not—become one of the women locked in the attic, or locked in the crypt.”

The girl comes to not just any house, but a mansion built from a ruined abbey or castle. It’s situated on sea-swept cliffs, or foggy moorland, or deep in a rugged forest, “a house of secrets, a house of ghosts and haunts.”

The girl is alone, with no one to call on for help: orphaned, any surviving relations indifferent, with few friends made at the orphanage or school. Still, she’s better off than the girls who are locked away or thrown into the streets. At this new house, she’ll be a governess, or companion, or distant relative, never a servant. Servants, she knows, never star in this kind of story, for all they’re uniquely positioned to hear gossip and explore the house while avoiding the rough-tongued cook below stairs. The girl must be neither quite family nor staff; her position with the man will be uncertain.

The house has a man, of course, its owner or heir, given to mysterious moods that render him of “endless fascination.” There must be at least one other man to provide a contrasting object of interest, happier and more stable, a joker perhaps. Beware: joking men often use charm to conceal “their thirst for blood.” She might be better off with the moody master, or with one of the women.

The girl doesn’t know whom to trust. She doesn’t really know which of the women are sane, which mad, and she discounts the maids who are more intelligent and observant than she gives them credit for. Some women are locked in attics or crypts. Some lock themselves in. Some don’t want to meet the girl. The girl cannot become one of the locked-up women, although the idea of being locked in a space all her own is tempting. She has a house to explore, people to save, and her attraction to the central male to resolve.

None of the other residents can help her, “beyond dropping mysterious hints over tea.” The tea tastes odd, but no one wants to antagonize the cook by mentioning this. Some residents tell ghost stories. Some  bring up the many women the brooding man has known. The maids believe he broods because he’s known many women, but it could be vice versa. Any children in the house are adorable, but also troubled. The locked-away women say nothing, or nothing comprehensible.

The girl won’t take any of the residents on her explorations. The house has made them fearful, or else their blood has. Old families, and houses, are prone to such frailties. The brooding man would steer her away from his secrets. The cheerful man might be a murderer.

The girl’s arrival may convince the residents to host a party like those the house saw in the days before… before the unmentionable catastrophe occurred, so long ago even the locked-away women can’t remember it.

The house seems to the girl to tremble at the thought of the party. The girl knows she must conduct herself with care during it, both with the brooding man and the cheerful one who might be carrying daggers or poison. The brooding man may hire musicians to drown out the howling ghosts. Some may take this as a sign that he’s throwing off the house’s shadow at last. Naturally, though, the party ends with the discovery of a body. It’s topped by three silver bells, like the ones that appear every Thursday in the girl’s room.

She must use the bells to reveal the house’s secrets. The house itself is anxious for revelation. It’s waited a long time. It wants to live. The girl will uncover which cheerful man is the murderer. She will teach the children that monsters aren’t creatures only of their imaginations, or of the house. She will prove the locked-away women aren’t mad—they’ve just known too many monsters. Oh, and she’ll show that everyone, especially that corpse, should’ve paid more attention to the cook.

Only when all these things are done can she let her fingers sink into the walls, letting the house sink in turn into her skin. When she leaves—which she inevitably will—she’ll take the house and its residents with her. She’ll be haunted, but the house within her will be “a strong guard against loneliness—and monsters.”

She’ll also know it’s wise to pay attention to the cook!

Libronomicon: Suppose we overlook the curse, and hold a good old-fashioned party? What are the chances that a body will be found just when guests are sitting down to dinner? Surely that sort of thing only happens in books!

The Degenerate Dutch: In a house like this, charming men conceal a thirst for blood. You might be better off with the ones who want to lock you in the attic, assuming they’ll feed you there. Or with another woman, getting yourself into a different genre as swiftly as possible.

Madness Takes Its Toll: The house has women, some of them mad. Or perhaps they’re all sane, responding sensibly to the madness of the house and its monsters.

Anne’s Commentary

In the Nightmare Magazine author spotlight appended to “The Girl and the Book,” Mari Ness names the Gothic romances of Eleanor Hibbert (aka Victoria Holt) as a virtual compendium for the cliches alluded to in her short story. I grew up among Victoria Holt books, which regularly entered our family library via book club hardcovers and paperbacks exchanged among my mother’s friends until they disintegrated in my grubby and none-too-gentle hands. I remember the covers best, as so many featured compelling images of girls running away from houses that loomed menacingly under storm-swept skies. Often the girls were clad in diaphanous nightgowns, making one worry they’d catch their deaths of the sniffles or at least ruin their hairdos. Here’s a fair representative of this pleasing artwork:

You can read up on the trope of Girls Running from Houses at Joan Aiken’s website, which essay includes more juicy examples of “fleeing female” covers.

At the oft-palpitating heart of the gothic romance are indeed the young woman and the house of mysteries she enters in hopes of a haven and new life. A man owns and is therefore a principal part of the house and one of its central mysteries, generally as to why he’s so damn moody all the time. Some speculate there’s a woman to blame, or women, like the ones locked in the attic or basement or at least sequestered in a sickroom. Or, if dead, the woman haunts the house in the form of her portrait or her hidden journals/correspondence or perhaps a child, legitimate or otherwise. It could be the moody man has vanished her alive (as in that attic) or even killed her; either way, if the heroine is to redeem this man with her love, he must be redeemable. That is, the woman or women must have been gravely at fault, the man more sinned against than sinning. If Mr. Moody is really a villain, the heroine must reject him for another man, probably one initially unassuming rather than too upbeat and charming. The cheerful charmers have something up their sleeves, like a dagger.

But Mr. Moody usually wins out. Why not—he’s the Bad Boy who’s Not Too Bad. Maybe he doesn’t have a Heart of Gold exactly, but a Heart of Silver is good enough. However tarnished, it’s a vital organ the heroine can polish up.

From way back in the days when Ann Radcliffe was queen of the Gothic novel, the genre’s tropes were well-worn enough to inspire ridicule. The best satire, however, springs from contempt tempered by love, and so it’s Jane Austen who takes the prize. Northanger Abbey abounds in the cliches rather lovingly flogged by Mari Ness. A girl (Catherine Morland) comes to a mansion that’s grown up around, yes, an antique abbey! Being an avid reader of Radcliffe and her fellows, Catherine expects Northanger to offer all the mysteries and “horrors” in which she vicariously delights. She goes as the friend (companion) of Eleanor Tilney, daughter of the Abbey’s owner. He, General Tilney, must therefore be the Moody Man. As a widower, he might legitimately be Catherine’s object, but she’s long preferred his son Henry, who is a young man not only of humor but also of good principles, so not a sleeve-secreter of daggers. The General makes for a good center of mysteries, however, such as what really happened to his wife, whom Catherine shiveringly deduces he didn’t love and therefore has imprisoned somewhere in the house. She looks for hidden documents (she finds some old laundry bills) and finally makes it to Mrs. Tilney’s once-bedroom in search of clues. There she’s discovered by Henry, who persuades her to temper her overactive imagination. Like Ness’s girl, when the mysteries are solved, Catherine “can let herself change. Let herself grow.” Not by sinking tendrils into the house, though. A rational Catherine is quite happy with Henry Tilney’s humble rectory. She lets Eleanor Tilney play the classic heroine by marrying her beloved, after he goes from rags to riches enough for the moody General.

Ness points out that the mid-20th-century Gothic romancers “drew pretty heavily on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.” She’d like to think, though, that Jane eventually “conked Rochester hard over the head, and headed off to explore the world,” certainly a diversion from Gothic traditions. One midcentury novel plays brilliantly with those traditions, to literally divert into tragedy at its close. Or does it? That’s Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House.

Eleanor Vance is the youngish woman with an indifferent family and few friends who runs to a house of mysteries in search of sanctuary and the self she longs to be: one who belongs, who can be loved. Because such journeys always end in lovers’ meeting, Hill House must have a suitable male resident for her. Dr. Montague’s married, which leaves Luke (the house’s putative heir)—or in this case, a female resident, and Theodora is pretty much the moodiest of the three other ghosthunters. Or, wait, there’s also Hugh Crain, the original maker and master of Hill House. He makes a fine Gothic maybe-villain, nor should his being dead rule him out. Ghosts are Gothic-romantic, and if Eleanor winds up with anyone in the end, it’s with Hugh.

Except, here’s the atypical tragedy, she may only walk in isolated parallel with Hugh and the other ghosts of Hill House, since whatever walks there walks alone. On the other hand, she does become, if anything, a part of Hill House. The girl and the house, together forever, and maybe that’s Gothic romance at its purest!

Ruthanna’s Commentary

You can picture the cover now, can’t you? A woman in a diaphanous gown, running from a half-ruined mansion, hair wild in the moonlight… [Edited to add: I want it on record that I wrote this before seeing the Victoria Holt covers!]

So many possibilities lie behind that cover. And so many predictabilities as well: the gothic romance is a genre of plot, beats as surely integral as those of a mystery or romance. Ness’s deconstructive heroine is on some level aware of both possibility and predictability: it’s clear from the start that this is a girl who knows things, who has genre savvy and some level of agency over getting involved in this story. Gothic heroines have agency, but usually within deep constraints. They’re frequently stories about not getting to pick your role: about the bars of class and gender and economics, and about the danger of holding a liminal position where your enforced role has uncertain boundaries. Not ancient nobility like the brooding man, not clearly subservient like the cook and maids. But always, always, barred in by those who hold power.

Gothics are claustrophobic, even as they reveal that all roles carry uncertain boundaries and dangers. Houses that you must flee, but can’t get away from. Pasts and monsters and people that you must flee, but can’t get away from. The threat of being tossed out on the streets, and the threat of being locked up—and here, the temptation to lock yourself up, exchanging whatever freedom the world offers for the Wolfean de minimus room of one’s own. If nothing else it provides a door that locks, space that is yours alone, and a limit to the threats you must face.

If locked up, at least you might be fed. Given the time period, given the constraining roles available, this is far from a certainty elsewhere. Although what you eat, and whether you’re in any position to eat it, depend on what genre variant you’ve found yourself in. In a relatively mimetic gothic, you might simply be thought mad. But in Poe you might be in the liminal space between life and death; in Lovecraft the space between human and alien or human and eldritch horror.

Those not locked up, on the other hand, are likely to have gone a bit strange. Perhaps these eccentricities are caused by the house, or perhaps by their blood. Perhaps it has to be both: a gothic house, after all, is one with its family. When the House of Usher falls, it’s a disaster of both architecture and lineage. The rats in the walls are heralds of generational memory and trauma.

Part of claustrophobia is walls closing in, gradually reducing possibility, and that’s the shape of this story as well. The girl moves from metanarrative consideration of possible roles and possible lovers—get involved with another woman, and you might slip into another genre entirely—to specific results of those choices and ultimately to extremely specific, perhaps extremely well-planned, aftermaths. The hope of finding a room of her own first draws her to the house. In a gothic, the space is rarely your own—except that she will, ultimately, make it her own. Sort of.

In a traditional gothic, the relationship between girl and brooding man is overt, the relationship between girl and brooding house metaphorical. Here, it’s girl and house who come to a union merging both of their goals. She comes with the need to “coax out every secret, every ghost, every drop of blood.” And the house, in turn, wants everything revealed. It has its own agency and desires, like Hill House.

So was it her idea from the start, or does the house seduce her to put down literal roots? To sink tendrils into it like some not-so-metaphorical fungus? To become haunted, a monster who never has to worry again about being alone?

The best room of one’s own, perhaps, is the room one carries inside.

Next week, we celebrate our 450th post by watching some weird: Get Out, Jordan Peele’s 2017 directorial debut.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as r_emrys@wandering.shop, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post About That Brooding Man: Mari Ness’ “The Girl and the House” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 13-14. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

In the spring of her freshman year, Zelda first shows Sal the alts. They lie on the roof and gaze up into smoggy clouds. Sal looks at Zelda sidelong, humoring her. Sal is slipping away, because Zelda’s not worthy of her; she’s cool and strong, while Zelda’s scared; Sal “needs someone to walk beside her,” while Zelda needs her “to be one step ahead, and as big as the sky.”

Zelda “pressed her heart against the eggshell of the world, and willed, move, move.” And the clouds part, exposing stars and moons never seen above New Haven. Sal sees them, too. “What is this?” she asks. Later Zelda will chatter technicalities. For now she can’t speak.

Sal can see the alts now, but can’t step through. To “hitch” into alternate realities is most natural for Ramon, but Sarah and Ish can manage too. Zelda tries explaining the math, what “mental transformations” will gather spin. She tries traditional magical “props.” Sal remains “unhitched.” One night, as Zelda brainstorms solutions, Sal sits pointedly disinterested, internet-surfing. Why does Zelda need Sal to be an alt-rider? Maybe it just won’t work for her. Maybe she’s meant for the here-and-now world, where American soldiers are torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. She shows Zelda photos of their atrocities. Zelda’s sickened. “They’ll stop this,” she stammers. “They have to.”

From Sal’s look, Zelda knows that “if the world is a test, [she’s] just failed.”

Sal leads Zelda to the university administration building. Somehow Sal’s rigged her student ID for access to this house of mysteries. They go to an opulent conference room where the university board makes Decisions, overlooked by a painting of four men and a child. One of the periwigged fellows is the university “founder.” The child is black and has a collar locked around his neck. Everyone’s heard rumors of this painting, but the administration keeps it out of view. Sal accuses Zelda of wanting to escape this world’s ugly truths for extradimensional adventure. But, Sal says, “it doesn’t work that way.”

As Zelda weeps, heavy footsteps sound in the hall. Campus police? Wondering what they might do to Sal in particular, Zelda begins to understand “the edges” of what Sal’s trying to tell her. She’s already embraced a stiffly unresponsive Sal; now she pulls.

They land in a long-ruined conference room, under a sky vibrating to the cry of a great hunting cat. Sal’s embracing Zelda back, and laughing. Somewhere among the infinite alts, Zelda says, there must be one where they can fix things, make them right. “A crossroads,” Sal agrees, and now they have a shared goal.

* * *

After escaping from the cowboy, Zelda wakes on a cracked rooftop. The sky is cedar-red and bisected with a vast orbital ring. This alt was once highly advanced, but still fell. Rotting X-crosses with manacles stud the roof.

She is alone, for all that she clutched the others tight as they tumbled through alts. She fends off panic by telling herself they must be safe, just scattered, and that she will find them. Nevertheless, a “gnomelike” voice inside her whispers that she’ll never see her friends again, that all she does is fail.

Then someone groans: Ramon stirring under rubble. Zelda runs to him. They’re both aching, but have escaped serious injury. Ramon, though still “the half-honed, half-weakened product of the boy she had known,” doesn’t shout blame as her inner gnome expects. Instead he marvels at the orbital ring and tries to calculate how it was built. “What’s the plan?” he asks.

They’ll meet the others, as previously decided, at the Medicine Wheel. Once they’re on the road, Ramon can find them. First, though, they’ll need to find a car. His knack promises one down the ruined highway.

Zelda has to use her monocular to spot the vehicle. She also spots what could be campsmoke, but since the rooftop crucifixes look long-disused, she hopes the smoke-makers aren’t the ones who erected them.

Yeah, Ramon quips. They probably just killed and ate the crucifix guys.

That’s the spirit, Zelda tells him. Just like old times.

This Week’s Metrics

Against the Rot: Sometimes making the world a better place means retrieving long-lost knowledge from ancient, previously-unreadable tomes.

What’s Cyclopean: Dinosaurs are outlined against the sky, smelling of “rough feather-stink”. There seem to be a lot of dinosaurs in the alts, but if you think about the rarity of asteroid strikes, dinosaurs are the highest-probability denizens of Earth.

The Degenerate Dutch: Sal illustrates her impatience with alt-adventure by showing Zelda pictures of Abu Ghraib, and a portrait of Yale’s founder with an enslaved, collared African-American boy.

Weirdbuilding: For Zelda, the painting takes a moment to process: “It wasn’t instantly tritone abhorrent like some demon or Lovecraft monster, so that her mind refused to wrap around it.” Sal’s mind, on the other hand, has trouble with alt-travel. Zelda may want that skill to be pure math and science, but is willing to try and “help” Sal through yarrow and tarot, zodiac readings, and Hermetic chants. Maybe she should have tried green tea.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

If I had to guess who Zelda first taught to alt-jump, I would’ve assumed that she started with Sal. But no, she’s on the dinosaur road with Ramon first. Sal, who will ultimately run ahead of everyone, is the last to pick up “hitching.” She’s the last to think it’s important enough to do at all.

Zelda may want it to be math that breaks down the walls between worlds, but from here it looks suspiciously like desire doing the breaking.

Sal resists world-hopping not because she thinks it’s impossible, but because she thinks it’s a distraction from the real world. For Zelda, up to that point, it does seem to have been a boy’s adventure serial without larger purpose. It’s for Sal that she comes to the “conclusion” that alt-travel can save the world—as a way to keep her. Charitably, one might see the idea as a courtship gift. But it’s that larger meaning, the concept of the crossroads, that gives Sal the desire to jump. No wonder she’s the one who runs too far, too close. What did they think was going to happen, calling it a “crossroads” in the first place? Crossroads deals aren’t known for turning out well.

If I were a nervous sort, I might say the deal took place in that moment, when Zelda offers up the story of world-saving in exchange for Sal’s love. “She’s slipping away,” she says, before demanding exceptions to the impermanence of freshman flings—to her, precisely as impossible as magically changing this world to a better one. If one is possible, the other must be; world-saving must be possible in order to make their romance possible. This is Zelda-logic. To everyone else, she’s the larger-than-life hero. To her, Sal is the realest thing; she wants her not as an equal partner but “one step ahead, and as big as the sky.” And she gets—exactly what she says she wants.

The second-most-real thing to Zelda, once Sal shows it to her, is the painting hidden away in Yale’s administrative center: a portrait of the university founder with a boy he’s enslaved. It brings home her privilege, and differences between her and Sal other than the pedestal. She uses this epiphany to get them both away from campus cops who may or may not have guns, may or may not be extremely willing to use them against a woman of color. It’s literally weaponized ignorance, a trick I suspect you can only use so often.

The painting may be a power in its own right rather than just an image of power: Zelda imagines it thinking about the decision-makers who meet beneath it, enjoying its place where no one can approach who might make a fuss. “It wants us to know it’s here, and it wants us not to be able to do anything about it.” It’s notable that the white-hatted cowboy doesn’t appear in these chapters—except that the painting feels a lot like the cowboy? Certainly the ambiguously armed campus cops seem of a piece with that archetype: power unexamined, strong because unquestioned, hard to banish because rooted in original sins.

Pull all these threads together: If the crossroads is where you go to change this world into a better one, it must also be where you go to end the world, right? Remaking ends everything that came before, after all. Does Sal think she’s doing exactly what Zelda promised her, all those years ago—and that the cowboy is the destructive status quo?

Is she right?

And then we come out of memory to the present, and the gang’s first alt-travel together in years. But they’re no longer in a boy’s-own adventure, and no longer confident in even being able to find each other. Still, Zelda and Ramon can’t resist some of their habitual pluck, even as they flinch from now-equally-habitual fear and anger. At least there are—as always, apparently—pragmatic goals to distract them. Warlords to overthrow, princes to rescue… or in this case a car to retrieve from the postapocalyptic crucifix rando tow lot. Let’s hope the fine isn’t too steep.

Anne’s Commentary

Gladstone’s description of the Yale Corporation Room portrait spurred me to hunt for it online. As ever with the info-hoard that is the internet, it was a more complicated search than anticipated. Zelda doesn’t find the painting as “instantly tri-tone abhorrent” as a Lovecraft monster, or as “visceral” as the Abu Ghraib photos, but she’s shaken when she recognizes the depth of its banal-faced evil.

See it here for yourself. Four white guys in 18th-century finery and elaborate wigs, enjoying pipes and wine on the terrace above a garden where white children dance, well in the background as children should be, lest their noise disturb their elders. Zelda can be excused for not mentioning the frolicking kids. Her first impression is fair (and much like mine): Here’s another “indifferent piece of portraiture” like the ones Sal’s shown her in the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). So “absolutely mediocre, absolutely normal.”

She can also be excused for not zooming in immediately on the figure to the far right. If not for his white pocket-flaps and cuffs and for the white band on his headgear, the black boy could fade into the shadow of his masters, as a good servant should. Once you see him, though, the apprehensive look he casts over his shoulder makes his face the most arresting of the five foreground figures. From noticing that look, your eye naturally catches the silver collar that marks him as a slave and his owner as a person of high status, rich enough to adorn even the throats of his minions.

Sal identifies the paunchy central figure as Yale’s founder, but she doesn’t dignify Elihu Yale with his name. Why should he get one while the black boy remains nameless? According to the Smithsonian Magazine article linked above, the YCBA team researching the boy has not yet discovered his identity. Assistant curator Edward Town hasn’t given up hope. Though some scholars believe that 18th century European artists painted black subjects not from life but according to stereotypes, Town finds this assumption “unsatisfying and wrong.”

Who in the picture owned this enslaved child? As a merchant who made his fortune in the East India Company, Elihu Yale would have profited from the slave trade, but it’s unclear whether he was directly involved in it. If a viewer were to infer that Yale owned the boy, well, that was probably the point. Many portraits of the period included enslaved people as “props” to give the principal subject an aura of wealth, empire, status. Mastery. As just one more emblem of the white man’s superiority, a proper complement to sumptuous fabric, marble columns and elegant landscaping, the possession of people becomes the kind of “monstrous normal thing” that Sal needs Zelda to face. Adventuring in the alts won’t let Zelda escape the realities of their own world, which include this: that the decision-makers of modern-day Yale University can gather under a celebration of subjugation. As long as the painting’s kept from the public eye, even if everyone on campus has heard of it, that’s fine. That’s optimal. Let them know it’s there, and that they can’t do anything about it.

In fact, the public did eventually (belatedly) do something. In 2007, after years of protest and controversy, the University removed Elihu Yale and His Servant from the Corporation Room. Here’s the twist. The painting Gladstone hangs in the over-mantel place of honor is not Elihu Yale and His Servant, but Elihu Yale With Members of His Family and an Enslaved Child, which hung at YCBA on and off since its donation to Yale in 1970. Here’s the actual Corporation Room portrait.

Arguably, Elihu and Servant is more offensive than Elihu and Family. It leaves no doubt about whom this silver-collared domestic belongs to. Yale towers (and bulks) over the dark-skinned man to an iconographic extent—he is Large and In Charge, while the servant is Shrunken in Subjugation and cartoonish in execution compared to his master. He looks like an afterthought, as if the artist smacked his forehead and cried “But wait, I forgot to include THE emblem of Yale’s supremacy!”

So why does Gladstone switch paintings? Also arguably, Elihu and Family is more offensive than Elihu and Servant in that its silver-collared domestic is not a down-sized adult but a child more or less in realistic proportion to the other figures, comparatively less stylized, more expressive, more sympathetic. He’s better suited to Sal’s mission, which is to remind Zelda that however infinite the alternatives may be, this world right here, with all its ugly history, is Sal’s and Zelda’s and inescapable.

And yet—when Zelda finally does manage to hitch Sal into an alt, Sal relaxes out of the pillar-like rigidity with which she’s been resisting Zelda’s embrace. She laughs, because the alt was not what she expected. Wrecked world as it is, she must see enough promise to be open to Zelda’s idea: an alt corresponding not to their worst nightmares but to their aspirational dreams.

It’s Sal who takes up Zelda’s idea and names that destination: a crossroads.

In the next chapter, jumping back to present story time, Zelda and Ramon land in an alt ruined like all the rest, but with a hint that positive change was made or at least attempted: The arc of a vast ring, an artificial habitat in stationary orbit around its planet. Was it—is it—a success? Or was it the last trigger of destruction? In any case, it’s a wonder.

In any case, Zelda and Ramon can still joke, just like in the old times, and that’s enough for them to go on.

Next week, we explore the (sinister?) motivations of gothic heroines in Mari Ness’s “The Girl and the House”.[end-mark]

The post The Politics of Transdimensional Travel: Max Gladstone’s <i>Last Exit</i> (Part 7) appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we cover Tanith Lee’s “Nunc Dimittis,” first published in Charles L. Grant’s The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror in 1983.  Spoilers ahead!

Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace—Luke 2:29: Now you release your servant, Master, according to your word in peace.

Vasyelu Gorin has served the Princess Darejan Draculas from the age of sixteen until now, when even her beauty dims with age. Vassu is much younger than she, but now he is dying. When he tells her so, her wonder is “almost childlike,” and she asks whether he is glad. He is, Vassu says, except that he’s troubled for her sake.

Darejan insists he mustn’t worry about her. He has more than earned his peace, and after all, she’s no longer the huntress she was when Vassu joined her. She doesn’t sleep, seldom hungers, never lusts or loves: These are the comforts of old age.

Nevertheless, Vassu intends to find his own replacement. The Princess says the world no longer requires such things, but he argues. “The world,” he says, “is as it has always been. Only our perceptions of it have grown more acute. Our knowledge less bearable.”

He leaves her in a room shielded from daylight, leaves the mansion’s private park, and walks into a rainy city much like a forest. Among the vague shapes swarming there, he’ll know the one who will be of use to her. His successor: necessary, desired, yet the object of his jealousy. It isn’t long before footsteps follow him into an alley. A warm hand falls on his neck. Its owner demands his wallet, but even dying, Vassu retains the strength to easily overcome the thief. He’s a young man, graceful even sprawled in debris, intelligent, somehow innocent. His name, such as he’ll reveal, is Snake. Told Vassu wants something of him, Snake says he’ll do almost anything for the right price, and Vassu knows him for what he himself once was: thief and a whore both.

After buying Snake an expensive dinner, Vassu leads him to the mansion and tells Snake he’s to meet the Princess Darejan Draculas—no, not Dracula, another branch of the family. She’s dressed for the introduction: red satin gown, silver crucifix around her neck. Snake proposes to accept the crucifix in exchange for “making the Princess happy.” He leans against her, strokes her throat, says she can even drink his blood if she likes. Her response is a laugh that drives Snake back, for its flame-intense power frightens him. She’s no hag greedy to “lick up [his] youth with [his] juices.” Could she wear a crucifix if she were? Snake switches to fawning for sympathy, then bolts from the mansion.

Darejan asks Vassu what he’d like done after—he leaves her. He rejoices that his death will pain her, but his jealousy waxes over how Snake ignites her long-dormant fire. The next afternoon, Snake returns and dines with the Princess. Outside the salon, Vassu can hear their laughter, and how Snake’s goes from “too eloquent, too beautiful, too unreal” to “ragged, boisterous,” genuine. Just before dawn, Darejan emerges shining, her eyes “full of a primal refinding.” Vassu leaves the sleeping Snake in the salon. A few hours later, he’s gone.

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Snake walks the city. He assures himself he can humor this new “patroness” until it’s time to leave with whatever he can steal, but he’s uneasily aware of some “fate for which idea his vocabulary had no word.” At dusk, two men accost Snake. He’s upset someone badly. Snake breaks free, runs. He’s almost laughing when a thrown knife pierces his back. Gravely wounded, he slowly, torturously, crawls back to the vampire’s mansion. Finding him, Vassu remembers how he himself was beaten by aristocrats he’d robbed, how he crawled all the way to Darejan’s estate, how he’d known since first hearing her name in village tales that he’d one day serve her.

Vassu carries the dying Snake to Darejan and leaves them, for what’s to come is private. And so he doesn’t see her dose Snake with the unique elixir that is a vampire’s blood: one that heals all wounds, confers superhuman powers, and gifts the recipient with longevity.

When Vassu finally returns, Snake rests in Darejan’s embrace, gazing up at the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. And so she must be, reborn to youth and vitality, a “huntress once more…a bright phantom… gliding over the ballroom of the city…and all the worlds of land and soul between.”

Vassu’s jealousy has gone. To this death, he’ll “go willingly, everything achieved, in order. Knowing she was safe.” He watches the two enter the salon. He climbs the stairs, hearing “their silence, like that of new lovers.” Beyond the lamplight, he walks into darkness “without misgiving, tenderly.”

For, “how he had loved her.”

What’s Cyclopean: Snake’s eyes are the color of leopard pelts.

The Degenerate Dutch: Snake thinks of the rich aristocracy as willing to buy people: “their roots were firmly locked in an era when there had been slaves.” He’s not wrong, although in the Vampire’s case the slaves in question might have been Roman.

Libronomicon: The Vampire is reading a book from the library of Rodrigo Borgia. One suspects it isn’t safe for work (unless your work is corrupt poping).

Ruthanna’s Commentary

This is nearly gentle as vampire stories go—or at least, the ungentle bits are human. “Vampire” is capitalized throughout; the Princess is holy to Vassu, a source of moth-drawing light rather than a predator. When her predation is mentioned at all, she’s a “huntress,” like Artemis perhaps, and her lovers wake cold in the morning—but they wake. Not exactly a Carmilla, at least as her loving servant describes her.

If there’s immortal-spilled blood here, it’s in Lee’s lush prose, where everything remains fabulously textured even when the characters are jaded. The Vampire, teeth worn by age, is dynamic with the “savage luxuriance” of her “starved bones of her face.” Mugging becomes homoerotic, another intricate ritual allowing men to touch each other’s skin. Vassu mocks Snake for confusing “prey” and “pray,” but his mockery the way these concepts twine together in his thoughts about his mistress and the world.

I’ve previously mentioned my original introduction to Lovecraft through role-playing, but the bulk of my college games were in White Wolf’s old World of Darkness universe, most often Vampire: The Masquerade. Much of Lee’s take on vampirism—vampiric servants in particular—felt familiar, in the same way a habitual D&D player will find Lord of the Rings familiar on first read. Lee’s story is from 1983, and WoD launched in 1990; the bloodline of inspiration seems easy to trace. In addition to the practical mechanic of creating a long-lived and perfectly loyal servant by feeding them vampiric blood, the angst and vivid decadence also suit the game’s mood. Or at least the mood the designers intended; angst is fun to read about but we tended to play characters who enjoyed their immortality. I once made a list of the things I would like to learn and do, and was fairly confident that I could get through a few thousand years before running out.

The Princess and Vassu don’t whine. But they’re both past joy in everything they’ve done and learned. Their knowledge, they say, has become “less bearable.” Does long life inevitably provide too much knowledge of things man wasn’t meant to know, or simply too much opportunity to correlate the contents of one’s own mind? One could get mired in the world’s repeating patterns, the refusal of ordinary mortals to learn from history one recalls vividly.

Or just tired from trying to keep up. I love the way both Vassu and Princess are shown out of step through their clothing. Her dress, almost two centuries old, opens the story—but Vassu, too, walks the streets in garb that fails to “pay homage” to his surroundings. This phrasing delights me: one does, after all, show with one’s clothing whether offers respect or even acknowledgement to societal norms, to setting, to century. For someone as poised as the Princess, as immersed in the world of balls, this must once have been vital—but she and her servant no longer put that much effort into tracking the now.

Of course, for the Princess, this unbearable state, the “comfort” of being past love and lust, is only temporary. A new servant, young and untutored, restores the sharpness of her fangs and the eagerness of her mind. “Only she could continue,” says Vassu, “for only she could be eternally reborn.” Does she forget her past, then, or does it get a new shine when she has someone new to share with? She can’t forget too much, for she was able to teach young Vassu language and art and culture. So perhaps she borrows the youthful perspective of her servants, drinking it as she drinks the blood of her lovers. And as their vigor and joy wane, so too do hers.

Along with language and art, the Princess also teaches Vassu “profundity, mercy.” When she asks if he worries about damnation, he assures her that she has given him only blessing. Like Snake, he was the sort of person likely to invite a violent death, and yet he hasn’t killed so much as a moth for over a century. So she doesn’t only take from her servants, but give as well—again, as much deific as monstrous. A light that attracts moths—but somehow, for a century or two, keeps them fluttering before they burn.

Anne’s Commentary

The first time I read this story, I thought it was the most romantic thing ever, and I wept tears of blood. Okay, not of blood, just of salty water, but I was emo enough to wish they were blood, because how appropriate would that have been? As I remember it, I was in high school, prime emo time. No, it’s more embarrassing than that. “Nunc Dimittis” was first published in Charles L. Grant’s 1983 anthology, The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror, and I was not only out of high school by then but out of college and supposedly a responsible adult. Responsible adults don’t weep over the moribund minions of vampires. Except when they do, possibly with frequency.

I didn’t cry this time—nowadays that takes Samwise asking Frodo if he remembers strawberries, because there’re some things in this world worth fighting for, or something like that. Can vampires still eat strawberries, or any human foods? As folklore varies from culture to culture, its authorities differ on this and many aspects of vampirism. Authors of fiction can choose to follow traditional motifs, or adopt the canon of “foundational” fiction like Stoker’s Dracula, or create new rules as desired. Darejan orders a catered spread for her first meal with Snake; it’s unclear whether she eats or just observes his youthful appetite. And do vampires drink anything besides blood? Carmilla drinks chocolate for breakfast, which is so Carmilla. Still, if the blood is the life, would you really need or want more?

Darejan’s family, the Draculas, is only an offshoot of the Count’s, mind you—she differs from him in crucial ways. In Stoker’s novel, as in the folklore that inspired it, vampires don’t burst into flame when exposed to sunlight. Dracula often walks during the day; his powers, however, are reduced when the sun’s up. Carmilla, who precedes Dracula in weird fiction, has no problem taking daytime excursions. By the care Darejan takes to exclude “every drop of daylight” from her immediate surroundings, we might infer it’s deleterious to her, if not fatal. There’s no doubt she doesn’t share Dracula’s aversion to crosses, since her favorite ornament is a silver crucifix. It’s visual proof, as she chides Snake, that she’s not “such a fiend” (presumably, as other vampires.) And, as far as we know from the text, Darejan’s “lovers” wake up alive in the cold morning, nor does she aspire to spawn legions of new vampires. Does this make her a “good” vampire, comparatively a lesser monster?

The absence of corpses doesn’t mean Darejan never left any in her wake, or Vassu in her service. He hasn’t killed as much as a moth in a hundred years, but he’s served his Princess for longer than that.

To ask the core question, what’s Darejan’s existential status as a vampire? Has she ever been human or always a distinct species? Demonic? A compound creature? Is she alive or dead, a malignant ghost or a more discriminating zombie? “Naturally” immortal or reborn so? Lee tells us that “in common with all living things,” Darejan ages. There’s no mention that she was ever anything but a vampire, or that she had to be turned into one, nothing like the iconic “origin” stories that tell who “made” whom. Death’s a condition so alien to her that it inspires “childlike wonder” and envy. All the comforts of old age are hers except dying into eternal rest.

It’s the old immortality problem. Will it be forever bats and moonshine, or will it get boooooring, add another “o” for each century? It looks like Darejan only droops into ennui when she enters the geriatric phase of her life cycle and is denied the joys of sleep, hunger, lust and love, the exertions and thrills of the hunt. Give her a new object of interest, of “primal refinding,” and she starts cycling back to youth, beauty, intense power, and appalling life. Could it be part of the symbiosis between her and her servant that when he starts to age, so does she? When a compatible replacement’s found, as essentially vital and predatory as she in his human way, she’s instantly renewed.

In his blog Taliesin Meets the Vampires, Andrew M. Boylan reviews a televised version of “Nunc Dimittis,” summing it up as “Renfield’s Tale.” Renfield is THE iconic Vampire’s Servant, as his master Dracula is THE iconic Vampire. Manically insane, sometimes repulsive and sometimes oddly appealing, he’s arguably Stoker’s most vivid character despite his supporting role. Vassu is Lee’s protagonist, and like the domestic staff in your Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey, he deserves to share—or, in fact, dominate—center stage. He’s more fortunate than Renfield, who’s promised the immortal life he’s always craved, only to be discarded in a bloody heap after defying Dracula. Darejan’s gift of blood doesn’t render Vassu immortal, but in his extended time, he learns and experiences so much, and loves so deeply, that he can tell the Princess “In the life you gave me, I was blessed.” Snake, as much the rogue-by-necessity as Vassu was in his youth, bids fair to reap the same benefits.

On the subject of vampire servants, I’ve just finished Anna Burke’s new novel, In the Roses of Pieria. Her vampires have the usual ability to enthrall victims into doing their will or providing easy meals, but they can also strike up fascinating symbiotic relationships with humans—and other beings. If you like that sort of dynamic, plus dark academia and hot romance, check it out!

Next week, we find out what happens after you get away from the zombies in Chapters 13-14 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as r_emrys@wandering.shop, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

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This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 11-12. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

After escaping from the roadhouse, cowboy in pursuit, Ramon and Ish flee through alts, trying to lose him. At one stop, post-apocalyptic Neo-Confederates assault them wearing white hats. Finally, battered and aflame, the Challenger slides into the motel parking lot. Sarah pulls Ramon out, as she did ten years before; less enthusiastically she extricates Ish, who has an arrow through his shoulder. There’s evidently some bad blood between these two.

June grabs fire extinguishers, and she and Sarah douse the car. The cowboy begins to manifest, boot heels clicking. Sarah and June join hands to deny him access, but it takes Zelda linking into the chain to repel him.

Sean, the kid from the front desk, wants to call the police. Sarah persuades him to let her handle the situation, to help instead by fetching linens. As she prepares to extract the arrow, Ish tries to apologize for—something. Sarah cuts him short.

The gang convenes in a conference room. Zelda refrains from gushing her relief that they’ve come. They debate whether the cowboy is Sal’s avatar or a separate enemy. Rot doesn’t usually attack through tech. Ish notes that the internet has “its own uncertainty,” but June insists the cowboy isn’t Sal. Either way, they need to outrun both. Zelda says they have to find the crossroads, where spin concentrates and the world can be changed. They couldn’t get there before, Ramon says. Does Zelda think this time will be different, just because “it has to be”? Yes, Zelda replies. “Because it has to be.”

Sean announces that someone’s on the front desk phone for them. Zelda, Sarah and June go down. Outside the lobby doors stands the previously-cowboy-munched park ranger, sporting his own white hat. Though obviously dead, he speaks through the phone (not actually with a phone). The cowboy hasn’t yet mastered how to “have a body. How to be in one place, not in every place.” So he makes helpers. Some have already arrived.

Out in the parking lot, white-hatted people emerge from trucks. The cowboy’s coming, but he offers a deal. If Zelda joins them, the others will be spared. Except for June. The cowboy needs her, too. Zelda declines, and the ranger drops lifeless. Sean again wants to call the police. Sarah points out that the sheriff’s car is already there, and June knocks the phone from Sean’s hand. It rings: Unknown number. Then every phone in the motel starts ringing.

Upstairs, the cacophony rouses Ramon and Ish. The television displays the cowboy emerging from blue-static fog. The two battle through white-hats to join the others. Zelda hatches a desperate plan to “hitch” into another alt—never mind that it didn’t work when they tried it before.

They race roofward. Storm clouds gather above, good. White hats surround the building, bad. The alt-riders link hands and gather spin. Sarah asks Sean to come with them, but he’s determined to save the white-hats, many people he knows. If nothing else, it’ll buy the riders time.

Sean steps into the stairwell and locks the door behind him. He tries to break off the key, as he’s seen heroes do in movies, the kind of heroes he writes about in his own stories. Footsteps ascend the stairs, revealing his brother Earl. Early looks like himself except for the white hat. Earl warns Sean away from this fight: his whole life’s ahead of him. The people he’s defending are criminals. The cowboy’s told Earl how they’ll admit the thing that howls out in the dark, to eat the world whole. The cowboy wants to stop this catastrophe.

Sean finally breaks off the key. Earl grabs him. Other white-hats line the stairwell, parting to allow the cowboy himself to climb. He lifts his hat-brim to reveal his face.

Into which Sean spits.

Back on the rooftop, the storm breaks and lightning flashes. Hold tight, Zelda tells the others. If they’re separated, head toward the Medicine Wheel. Thunder growls. A voice sounds. Each alt-rider hears a different message, temptations tailored to their vulnerabilities. Meanwhile something pounds the door.

Zelda’s shaken by the voice’s accusations—that she’s weak, that she’s already lost her friends—but spin, the power of what might be, counters it. The clouds shift to form a human face with lightning eyes: Sal. Yet it’s far more awful (“awe-ful”) than she ever was.

Zelda reaches high and calls down lightning. It courses through the building, shorting out the electrical devices that enable the cowboy. The thunder tells Zelda: I missed you. Then, into “a darkness in the heart of light,” the alt-riders slip away.

* * *

The motel catches fire. Unconcerned about the fate of his minions, the cowboy emerges from the burst-open rooftop door. As he looks to the sky, his hand falls to his holster, but the cloud-face has vanished. He tips his hat to the storm, then steps off the edge of the roof and is gone.

This Week’s Metrics

Against the Rot: It’s Climate Solutions Week at NPR; I’ve just started to dive into the articles.

What’s Cyclopean: Zelda’s lightning looks “like jellyfish, it schooled and danced, and in those flashes, the clouds were iridescent green, purple, blue, were bloody red and all the colors of a coral reef. …The lights bared pieces of the clouds’ holy anatomy, God performing the dance of veils…”

The Degenerate Dutch: Sarah points out that the world’s been ending for a long time. “Ask anyone who was living here before white folks. There used to be so many people in this country that when most of them died, their escaped livestock became those million-head buffalo herds people tell stories about.”

Weirdbuilding: Zelda tells off the cowboy and “all his squamous buddies.”

Libronomicon: Ramon and Ish riff on Lord of the Flies, joking about using a pig’s head or a conch shell to determine who gets to speak in the planning meeting. Seems like a bad omen. But it’s not the team turning on each other today, it’s the local community, Sean’s neighbors making sure that his horror novel Fear will never get finished.

Anne’s Commentary

Whenever I see an impeccably restored vintage car cruising down the mean streets all other vehicles use, I wonder what its driver can be thinking. Whether luxury sedan or Depression-era truck or muscle car, these rides are always preternaturally shiny, without the tiniest scratch on glass or dimple in bumper. Even their inner workings are cleaner than your average operating room. How could anyone dream of exposing such labor-intensive perfection to potholes, pigeons, atmospheric grime, stray nails and tractor-trailers and tail-gaters?

Yet here’s Ramon, once again driving that Challenger into the post-apocalypse hellscapes of the alts. Sure enough, it lands in Montana banged-up and on fire. That’s got to be heart-breaking for Ramon, even if the Challenger is a magical telepathic car with as many lives as Stephen King’s Christine.

None of Zelda’s classmates has had a pleasant journey to their ten-year reunion. At their first official get-together, she shares her ideal vision for the event: Fourth of July and fireworks, all of them lounging on a lawn and talking into the night while music drifts over from another blessedly mundane celebration, with not one selection from the Incomplete Works of Erich Zann to harshen the mood.

That Zelda could come up with that idyllic scenario proves her amazingly resilient capacity to hope. Better than the others, she knows it will be a pending catastrophe that reunites them. She’s the one who’s stayed on the alt-roads, while the others have made lives and families and whole “normal” worlds for themselves. They could’ve ignored her call and preserved their hard-won safe places a little longer. June, too, or June especially—hers was an essential ignorance of the Enemy. June didn’t have to step onto dark paths, or the others return to them.

Maybe they had no other choice, because in spite of the infinite possibilities inherent in an uncertain cosmos, there are some inevitabilities, certainties, destinies. Zelda worried that her friends might ignore her summons, but that’s self-doubting Zelda all over. The alt-riders are on a mission from—whom? Probably none would feel comfortable saying their orders come from God, though Ish thinks of the Enemy as a great serpent, a form God’s opposite traditionally takes. Ramon and Zelda fall back on the simplest language to define their way forward. What makes Zelda think that this time they’ll reach the crossroads? Ramon supplies the answer, which she affirms: This time will be different because it has to be. They will go to the crossroads. They will stop the rot. They will save the world. That short word will is long in meaning. Without qualifiers, it implies certainty. Will also expresses desire and determination. As a noun, it’s the mental faculty that drives us to pursue and achieve goals. As a verb, it’s the exercise of that faculty: I will the world to change, Zelda’s pet determination.

If we equate will with wish, then willing something won’t necessarily make it so; combined with action, however, it increases the probability of achievement. Get enough power into your will, or combined wills, enough spin, and you can make miracles happen. Magic.

First you need the right team. Looking around the circle of her friends, Zelda realizes that for all the surface changes, they’re the same people she met at Yale. Was their coming together the random result of roommate pairings and parties attended? Zelda doubts it. They fit together so well, meshing like fine-cut gears. “There was a clockwork fit to them,” she thinks, recalling the deist analogy of creation by a Divine Horologist, who sets the intricate device in motion, then leaves it to function on its own. She goes so far as to imagine that if she could turn fast enough, she might “glimpse the clockmaker’s retreating hand.”

Problem: Clocks can be damaged. Rot can hollow out the world. Rot can clog gears, setting off an amplifying chain of failures. Rot can exploit innate weaknesses in the components, for can even God fashion a perfect creation?  Would God want to? Might it not be more amusing to see whether flaws can foster strengths? Fun with paradoxes! The Enemy’s voice tries to convince Sarah that her friends will leave, the world is doomed, and she should fly away home. Instead, love of family makes her stay; the only way she can protect her kids beyond a few meals is to —oh hell, save the world. The voice tells Ramon he’s a quitter. For him, it’s the memory of Gabe that defeats the impulse to run. Ish is tempted to join the master program that knows him from the inside, as Ish has been trying to know the whole world via his digital networks. But Ish has also constructed an avatar for the Enemy whose blandishments he can resist. It’s the serpent, the serpent that gnaws away the roots of the world.

To Zelda, the voice whispers that she’s “a bear trap wearing person clothes,” the reason for all their troubles; what’s more, her friends were never really hers, and that goes for Sal, too. She’s saved by the spin she and her fellow alt-riders channel, and by a superlatively beautiful cloud-manifestation of Sal herself, “haloed in spider legs and black lightning”.

Significantly, the cowboy looks toward the Sal-face clouds and reaches for his holster. It’s the automatic response of someone confronted by his archnemesis. Sal’s not his ally, then, but is she his rival or his antithesis?

Last words go to Sean, a deathspian of substance and geeky grace.

I’ll miss him.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

This week raises the horrifying question: what if we have two problems? Admittedly I have about six problems, myself, but the gang’s problem(s) put them in perspective.

The rot is a supernatural problem from outside our reality, given room to enter by—or perhaps embodied by—mundane problems inside our reality. Which comes first, apocalyptic machines or the magic that gives them alt-eating power? It’s big and wild and even beautiful if you stare into the abyss from just the right angle. (Possibly the angle in question is “inside the abyss”.) The rot can be held back by certainty, human (as with the collective self-image of New York City) or computerized (as with the surveillance power of Ish’s services). It can be cast out, at least in spots, and every incursion takes a different form. It thrives on human conflict, but doesn’t seem aware of specific human in-groups and outgroups.

The cowboy claims to be different from the rot. He acts different, drawing strength from technology, and not only the social media that “[destabilizes] reality on a personal level.” His attachment to the horrors of our world—America in particular—also seems more direct. The rot doesn’t, as far as we can tell, thrive on the human desire to belong. He does. He notices human boundaries. He’s American, or at least willing to take on that guise. “…you do know that I am here, that I have been here as long as this has been America. I’m realer than any of you, and I ain’t nothing you got rights to cast out.” Yet he’s fighting the rot’s fight for all practical purposes, even as he claims that Zelda et al enable it rather than just acknowledging it.

In the hotel, he has them surrounded. Sean, bystander turned fighter, shares the common desire to have his neighbors and family be victims rather than something worse—to have the real bad guy be other. But neighbors and family are volunteers for the monster, and we all learn quickly to flinch at the sight of a specific color of hat. Boy, that’s an obfuscatory metaphor, no clue what it’s about.

There’s a zombie apocalypse feel to the hotel scene, and a zombie apocalypse feel to any situation in which you discover your loved ones’ brains getting eaten by zombies (conspiracy theories and disinformation). There are alts where the zombies are literal. There are alts, in fact, with every impossible apocalyptic scenario, from zombies to dinosaurs to roving gangs of cannibals. What they all have in common is the lack of any survivors we’d easily describe as human.

One of my favorite non-fiction books is Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, which draws on much experience and data to show that humans, actually, handle crises pretty well. In times of disaster, it turns out, we don’t mostly steal each other’s last cans of food and then turn into cannibals. We build communities and help each other out—until authorities undermined by that mutual aid come along and break down those networks, or until things improve enough that we can stick to our familiar in-groups again. It’s not apocalypse that makes us monsters, but chronic stress—everyday fear and hatred with no clear solutions or ways to help, things bad but not quite bad enough that you actually have to band together.

Perhaps that’s the rot’s power: that it changes how easy is it to make people into monsters, and what kind of people turn into what kind of monsters. The rot bridges mundane problems and mythical ones, everyday resistance and heroism, everyday moral failures and monstrosity. June, a knight with shining fire extinguishers, is also the person who argues against calling the cops on zombies—because she notices that the cops are zombies. Sarah tends wounds with first aid and spin, and also reminds Zelda that the world ending is nothing new. Sean, having a bad night at a crappy job, can plot his own horror novel in one moment, try to talk his brother out of zombiedom in another, and spit in the cowboy’s face the next and final.

Levels of reality blur in an eldritch Gish gallop, and perhaps the number of problems doesn’t matter so much as their severity. Eventually, you have to throw the ring into Mount Doom—and you have to walk, getting blisters on your toes, the whole way.

Next week, join us for Tanith Lee’s classic “Nunc Dimittis.” You can find it most easily in Blood: 20 Tales of Vampire Horror.[end-mark]

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This week, we’re reading Maurice Broaddus’ “The Iron Hut,” first published in Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles’ 2014 Sword and Mythos anthology. Spoilers ahead.

“Like living scrolls, the men had words—old words not meant to be pronounced by human tongues, carved into their flesh.”

Part I: Miskatonic professor Leopold Watson leads an archaeological expedition to Tanzania, seeking the legendary city of Kilwa Kivinje. The dig uncovers a crystalline shard engraved with what may be the earliest inscription ever discovered, possibly in archaic proto-Bantu. Or even in a language not quite human, like those Watson’s read of in the Miskatonic archives.

The Pickman Foundation has funded the expedition and sent a representative in the slothlike yet overbearing Stanley McKreager. While the shard makes Watson nauseous, McKreager peers with clueless fascination. He suggests they publicize the shard as an artifact of Atlantis. Of course Africans couldn’t have fashioned the protolinguistic shard—the Foundation wouldn’t like that! Stomach churning at the fabrication, Watson proposes a compromise attribution to Portuguese artisans, or Portuguese-trained Africans.

He goes to his tent, thinking of Elder Things and regretting his time among the Miskatonic tomes. Falling into troubled sleep, he dreams of ancient warriors.

Part II: What price friendship, Nok warrior Dinga wonders as he struggles up the mountain towering over Kilwa Kivinje. An icy storm rages, daunting even to an experienced hillman. He never trusted the laibon (ritual leader) who sent him on this fool’s errand, but a friend’s life hangs in the balance.

It started a couple days earlier, when Berber thieves attacked Dinga. He welcomes the chance to honor his god Onyame by slaying them. An old friend, Masai warrior Naiteru, appears in the nick of time, not that Dinga needs help. The two banter in comradely fashion as they slaughter the thieves. But Naiteru’s minor wound bleeds unaccountably. They set off for nearby Kilwa to heal up.

Part III: Dinga finds a subterranean passage that twists deep into the mountain’s rocky bowels. Faint amber light reveals cryptic carvings on strangely angled walls. Some carvings resemble his own tattoos, but that’s a mystery for another day. Right now he’s concerned with the human bones littering the passage, and the mummified corpse of a crystal-encased warrior. Hunter’s instinct warns him he’s not alone; from deeper in the mountain come strange cries and scraping footfalls. He raises his sword and waits.

Flashback to Dinga and Naiteru’s arrival at Kilwa. During their trek, Naiteru’s condition has worsened. Dinga remembers how Naiteru’s father took in Dinga as a boy, making them brothers. To his surprise, Kilwa Kivinje turns out to be no village of mud-and-wattle huts but a stone-walled city of magnificent houses and iron smelting furnaces. Kaina, laibon of the Chagga people, welcomes the wounded warriors. He provides food and wine and the healing attentions of maiden Esiankiki, but Dinga mistrusts him as he does all magicians. Kaina tells them Naiteru’s father has died of a plague caused by “necromantic magic and strange creatures called from the Night.” Dinga’s mistrust grows. Too late he suspects his wine’s drugged.

Back inside the mountain: Dinga’s attacked by star-headed, bat-winged, tentacled monsters. He slays them and warms himself on their green-oozing bodies, tauntaun-like, before moving on.

Flashback to Dinga waking bound. Naiteru lies nearby, failing. Kaina accuses Dinga of being the plague-bringer—he’s foreseen that Dinga will destroy the city. He puts Dinga to the Trial by Ordeal, forcing him to drink a poisoned concoction. Dinga survives, proving he’s not a member of the Brotherhood of the Higher Ones who live in an iron hut atop the mountain. They are the ones sickening the land. To save Naiteru and the city, Dinga must confront them.

And so he’s come at last to that iron hut, through a hall of paintings that show people worshipping creatures from the sea. In the hut kneel horribly mutilated men and their witch-mother, an ancient white-skinned crone. Gelatinous eggs cling to the wall behind her.

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Dinga slays the men. But the witch-mother laughs as the air splits between them, emitting a sickly yellow-green glow. Dinga’s vigor, she says, will call forth the Dweller Outside! Knowing no counter-ritual, Dinga runs her through. A bestial howl sounds from beyond, and an ebon tentacle lashes from the split to entomb the dying witch-mother in crystal.

The altar tears from the wall, revealing a passage. Dinga escapes as an explosion erupts behind…

He returns to Kilwa Kivinje to find the city utterly destroyed. The stench of burned flesh reigns. Crystal shards lie scattered. Naiteru alone “survives,” no longer Dinga’s friend but Naiteru-Kop, touched by the Old Ones and destined one day to usher them into this plane. He easily counters Dinga’s attack, saying they’ll meet again.

Part VI: Professor Watson wakes, sweating with dread. He’s certain their discoveries have awakened something. He flees the camp but sees McKreager staggering after him, clutching the shard. The man’s skull splinters, bones shattering in five directions. He emits words of a weird musical quality.

Watson begins to laugh. A terrible, cold laughter.

What’s Cyclopean: There are “lurking horrors” in the “wavering ebon murk.”

The Degenerate Dutch: McCreager is much more comfortable with the idea of Atlantean ruins than with African artisans producing exquisite work before Europeans—or at least he’s pretty sure his bosses will prefer the Atlantean hypothesis.

Mythos Making: The framing story involves an ill-fated Miskatonic University expedition funded by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation. Watson mentions records of elder things, and the things themselves appear as relatively-easily-skewered foes in Dinga’s adventure.

Libronomicon: Leopold reads a “damnable book” at Miskatonic, but at least it’s written on non-living material—unlike most of the writing that Dinga encounters. Then there’s the nauseating writing on the crystal shard, written in “a tongue long dead and not quite human.”

Madness Takes Its Toll: Dinga and his Chagga hosts accuse each other of falling prey to madness, by which they both seem to mean random acts of violence and/or sorcery.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

“The Iron Hut” comes originally from Sword and Mythos, a Moreno-Garcia anthology that’s unfortunately extremely out of print. Which is a pity, because cosmic horror and sword-and-sorcery started as sibling subgenres, but are rarely seen in company these days—and even less in a setting both fond of both and deeply aware of their original flaws. Broaddus provides an exception in the old tradition: Dinga wanders as a semi-lone warrior through a series of “sword and soul” stories informed by African history and culture. Broaddus credits Canadian fantasist Charles Saunders with founding this tradition, and inspiring Dinga’s stories, in his Imaro series.

Both sword fantasy and mythos are prone to poorly-researched exoticization—or plain old villainization—of African cultures, so finding something that keeps the drama-filled adventure while shoring up the foundation is delightful fair play. The Chagga, for example, feel like they’re following real cultural patterns—they may only be on page long enough for a dramatic life-or-death test and some exposition, but one gets the impression that most of their customs don’t involve tying up heroes.

We’ve covered samples of older sword/mythos overlap via C.L. Moore and Robert Howard. Epic heroes must encounter something that can stand against strength, cleverness, and enchanted swords—and entities beyond human comprehension are often inconveniently hard to hit. Plus said entities tend to be worshipped by cults following obscene practices in ornate-yet-non-Euclidean temples, which makes for great pulpy scene-setting. These temples—like the one Dinga finds—may even be carved with unreasonably informative bas reliefs to summarize the incomprehensible. (I have a serious soft spot for unreasonably informative bas reliefs, and may have startled my kids with inexplicable parental delight when one showed up in a cavern beneath Dinotopia.)

An old-fashioned cult needs not only excellent décor, but rituals that would be disturbing even if they didn’t culminate in summoning ancient horrors. Broaddus’s face-sewn summoners remind me of Llewellyn’s (much less safe for work) body-horror-filled rituals. Like many who try to commune with elder gods, they also benefit from non-human attendants. I have to admit that I wanted more elder things than I got—from Dinga’s perspective, they’re basically monsters of the week. Given that they represent one of Lovecraft’s first complex non-human cultures, and given that Dinga is as much trickster as fighter, I’d have loved to watch him talk his way around them, dealing with them as people rather than mere radially symmetrical goons.

The confrontation with the elder things reminded me of another barbarian dealing with the unnamable: Campbell in “Challenge From Beyond,” dragged from Lovecraftian fear to Howard-ish joie-de-vivre and the conquest of an alien world. You can react existentially to aliens and elder gods, or you can take a more practical approach. Dinga is definitely on the practical side—which serves him well, until it doesn’t. Running the danger through with a sword, he learns, only goes so far when the danger isn’t entirely physical. And his friend pays the price.

And not only his friend—I haven’t until now mentioned the framing story. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Leopold Watson, who seems to have gotten funding for an expedition he didn’t want (but maybe needed for tenure?). At the same time, I was drawn to the politics of archaeological interpretation, and the deep-time question of what survives from an ancient, adventurous life. Leopold’s funding partner would rather Atlantis than real African art and culture, and is perfectly happy to direct the claims that come out of their dig. Except that what actually comes out of the dig is inhuman horror that kills/transforms said partner and costs Watson his life, mind, and/or sanity. He’s named for an interloper and a perennial witness, and suffers the worst consequences of both. Is that due to the expedition’s failure to respect the real history? Or is it just the inevitable risk of Miskatonic’s unique approach to archaeology?

Anne’s Commentary

I wonder if Broaddus christened Professor Leopold Watson after Leopold II of Belgium, founder and sole owner of the ironically named Congo Free State. Leopold II may not be able to claim sole ownership of the title Vicious Colonial Ruler, but he’s a top contender for Most Vicious, given the millions of Africans mutilated or killed for his personal enrichment. Professor Leopold is no King Leopold, but neither has he the guts to stand up to the racial prejudices of his expedition sponsor and their watchdog McKreager.

That sponsor is the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, which also sponsored the 1930 Dyer-Pabodie expedition to Antarctica. Broaddus doesn’t tell us when Watson’s Tanzanian expedition takes place, so I’m going to imagine it too set forth in the 1930s, a decade when the Foundation appears to have been particularly flush and ambitious. I don’t know about the NDPF. Its ventures suffer from high mortality. Is it bad luck its explorers keep stumbling across Old Ones and Elder Things, or does the NDPF hope to, intend to, uncover Old Ones and Elder Things? You can’t put that kind of shenanigans past an organization named after a Pickman and closely associated with Miskatonic. Its whole board are probably Brethren of the Higher Ones!

The Associated Press is also in on it, because it’s the chief news purveyor for both expeditions. Go ahead and call me paranoid, but the fictional facts speak for themselves.

Conspiracy theorizing aside, for the moment, Lovecraft tells us in “At the Mountains of Madness” that Elder Things first made Earthfall on the part of the Paleozoic supercontinent that would become Antarctica; though that region remained sacred to them, they migrated to all parts of the planet. An early stop was doubtless Africa—its present day southeastern coast impinged on the present day northwestern coast of Antarctica. Tanzania would have been an easy commute.

More Lovecraft canon: The pervasive wall carvings studied by Dyer and Danforth indicate the Elder Things kickstarted Earth’s life. After they’d cultured enough shoggoths to do their heavy work, they allowed leftover protocells to differentiate at evolutionary whim into ancestors of today’s flora and fauna. That is, unless that undirected evolution spawned creatures inconvenient to them. These they eradicated.

One species that escaped eradication was a “shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon…whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.” Protohomo buffoonicus might have originated near African Elder Thing settlements and been exported elsewhere, for the entertainment and snacking needs of other ETs. Forward-thinking Elder Things might have cultivated the intelligence of early hominids. First, potentially intelligent hominids were nowhere near as threatening as potentially intelligent shoggoths. Second, given the vagaries of cosmic cycles, Elder Things would likely need surviving native species smart enough to one day Reopen the Doors and Bring Them Back.

Smart enough, that is, to learn the Sorcery required to trick brawny Swords into serving as flesh-and-spirit batteries for Rift Repair. Tanzania’s a fine place to set a sword and sorcery/Mythos hybrid. At first I was confused by where exactly in Tanzania Watson hopes to find his legendary Kilwa Kivinje. Kilwa Kivinje is a real town, but it’s a 19th-century Arab trading post on the east coast of the country, now (as Lonely Planet puts it) “a crumbling, moss-covered and atmospheric relic of the past.” Just not so distant a past as to merit “legendary” status. Watson notes that his Kilwa Kivinje is not far from the Olduvai Gorge, cradle of humanity. By not far I was thinking in Rhode-Island terms, say, a coupla blocks ovah. But Watson’s camped beneath ice-capped “peaks of mystery” that must be Mt. Kilimanjaro, with its three volcanic cones—two in the legend of Mawenzi and Kibo that Watson relates to McKreager; Shira’s the third cone. Kilimanjaro’s also known by the Masai name Oldoinyo Oibor or “white mountain.” Oldoinyo Oibor is what towers over Dinga’s Kilwa Kivinje. I think I’m figuring out my geography now. The Olduvai Gorge is over 200 kilometers from Kilimanjaro. I guess that’s “not far” for Watson. He’s obviously not from Rhode Island.

Anyhow. Though I’m not big on the sword and sorcery subgenre, I enjoyed Dinga’s blade-badassery and felt for his wanderer’s fate. At the same time, I kind of enjoyed how the sorcerers win in the end. Kaina and the witch-mother bite the shardy dust, but a new magician-servant to the Old Ones emerges in Naiteru, and even Dinga can’t run him through. I suspect, being suspicious, that Naiteru may have set his friend up to take out the sorcerers in his way to becoming top magical dog. Why did he show up just in time to lead Dinga to Kilwa Kivinje, arriving there just in time to present Kaina with a solution (ha!) to his Brethren problem. Or was Kaina hoping that when Dinga killed the witch-mother, Kaina could take over as Higher-One/Old-One intermediary? Ha again! Secret sorcerer Naiteru knew that if Old Ones had a choice of touching Kaina or him, ha thrice, no contest.

I’m not paranoid or anything. It’s perfectly reasonable to question why Leopold Watson bursts into “terrible, cold laughter” watching McKreager begin a skull-splitting transformation into Elder Thing. I’m not saying Watson’s become Watson-Kop, touched by the Old Ones. Only if I was the MU librarian, I wouldn’t grant this professor any further access to the Necronomicon.

Next week, Jamaica Kincaid’s “My Mother” suggests that the greatest source of disturbance may sometimes be familial. You can find it in The Weird.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is now available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

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This week, we’re reading Craig Laurance Gidney’s “Sea, Swallow Me,” first published in Ashé Journal in 2006; you can find it more easily in Gidney’s Sea, Swallow Me collection. Spoilers ahead—but we encourage you to go read it first.

“Why should I spare you when you have been looking for me ever since you came here?”

Summary

The island hates Jed, or so he thinks. On St. Sebastian, “everywhere you turned, the murdered homosexual saint appeared, like [the Virgin] Mary would in sandwiches and cloud formations.” Churches, of course, feature his image, but so do towels and T-shirts, the Arrow B&B, and the island’s only gay club, The Catamite. Jed has wearied of the resort district with its steel drum bands and fruity cocktails. He likes vacations with “a little bit of bite,” and so explores the neighborhood warned against in the guidebook: La Mer Vert, unofficially known as La Merde.

The shantytown makes him uneasy with its rundown buildings, vicious dogs, and “sullen eyes” watching from the “shade of the silent houses.” His spirits lift when he emerges on a beach with sand “soft as powdered sugar.” He wades into warm water and thinks I am the only imperfect thing here. But he wants to forget his ashen skin, too-thin body, and the “raised continent” of a keloid scar on his face, aftermath of a biking injury.

Singing voices recall him from reverie. Men in white suits and women in white dresses and blue headscarves process down the beach. Children weave among them. The men drag wagons filled with white flowers, note-stuffed bottles, shells, food. Jed can’t understand their dialect, but follows singing along, the melody seeping into his blood “like an infection.”

When the group halts, forming a semi-circle at ocean’s edge, they don’t seem to notice him. They sing, play drums, clap hands, drop offerings into the waves. Suddenly the music stops, and a blue-robed figure steps forward. It’s long-limbed, close-shorn, features eroded by age, a “priest beyond gender.” The priest glances at Jed, then away, and begins preaching in a musical patois. Jed wonders whom this congregation worships—guidebooks mention followers of obeah and Voudun. The congregation chants, and one word stands out: Olokun.

The sound O has always struck Jed as magical, “mystical and mathematical,” and he finds himself chanting along. Olokun’s a name that means sea and sky and sand, “endless and terrifying blue.” Their voices mimic the “tug and pull of the surf and the darker currents.” They stand “on the lip of the ocean” calling for him, or her, or it.

A woman explodes from the semi-circle, staggers, falls. Jed, an EMT, rushes to her side. The priest intervenes: Jed mustn’t touch her, she’s not sick. As Jed clasps her wrist, pain flares in his scar. She jerks and opens eyes without whites, twin ovals of blue. She leaps up and dances, “simultaneously robotic and graceful.” The congregation—and Jed—chant Olokun.

When the priest commands the woman to speak, she stills. She begins to reek of deep ocean. Her scarf falls off to reveal braided hair like a “grove of black coral.” She fixes her eyes on Jed and advances “slowly as a zombie.” His scar tingles with his fear; the woman’s deranged, and he’s an interloper, the “American Black who might as well have been white.” “You,” the woman says in basso profundo. “You are mine.” She takes his hand and leads him unresisting into the sea.

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They’re out deep, floating, when the water turns icy. The woman’s eyes lose their uncanny blue. She screams and swims toward shore. Jed cannot follow. The frigid riptide carries him off and under, surely too harsh a punishment for viewing Olokun’s ceremony!

Darkly inspired, Jed says “Olokun” three times. The sea swallows him, but he doesn’t drown, for the salt water satisfies his lungs. Down he drifts, into ever deeper shades of blue, all the way to “Chthonian Indigo,” where he comes to rest before a mountainous edifice of coral, shells and human junk. From it emerges a giant black-skinned man with a fish’s blue-green-gold tail for netherlimbs. Olokun’s green eyes capture Jed and burn him naked. To Jed’s plea of “Spare me,” the god answers, Why spare, when Jed’s been looking for him ever since coming to the island?

And it’s true, all Jed’s visits to the churches, to the grotto of St. Sebastian, entering bars “where male beauty was of paramount importance.” These were “all clandestine prayers to remove the raised blemish on his face.”

Olokun says Jed needn’t remove the “proud flesh,” which marks him with a “map of Guinea.” Nevertheless, in exchange for “something,” Olokun will take away the scar. What something, Jed barely has time to wonder before the sea swallows him again, the man-leviathan grinding in “molars of coral” all Jed’s thoughts of “blond-haired Adonises… blue eyes… brown-haired Jesus, tonsured men of the one God and the whores and virgins.” Jed himself is seared in Olokun’s belly and rejected from Olokun’s anus, along with his mental silt.

He wakes to yellow sand and the feet of black people—his people. He lies on the beach coughing seawater from his lungs while the congregation laughs and claps. Sleep takes him. He wakes again under a blanket, naked. He touches his face, finding smooth skin. He rises, the “serpent sun under the sea” in his heart, whole again.

And the island loves him.

What’s Cyclopean: Beautiful descriptions everywhere: The ocean is a “liquid geode,” while Olokun’s voice is like “hurricane-warped wood.” Jed makes up colors: stygian cerulean and chthonian indigo.

The Degenerate Dutch: Jed seems both to seek ambiguity in gender and find it uncomfortable, referring to an androgynous-seeming priest as “it.” He also refers to Olokun’s worshippers, briefly and in anger, as “stupid savages.” (Both cases seem to reflect some of what he’s rejecting in himself.)

Mythos Making: A man comes to a run-down seaside community, learns new things about himself and his heritage, and is drawn beneath the waves for the ecstatic completion of his discovery.

Libronomicon: When Jed first learns to read, he’s drawn to all those wonderful O-words: owl and opal and Orion.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Jed considers the possibility that he might be hallucinating while drowning; this does not upon reflection turn out to be the case.

Anne’s Commentary

“Sea, Swallow Me” recalls to my mind Lovecraft’s “Strange High House in the Mist,” in which outwardly staid academic Thomas Olney visits Kingsport and loses his soul to the gods of the deep seas. Losing his soul may be a good thing, however, since the soul can stay in the Strange High House and sport with naiads and what not, while his body (rather zombie-like) returns to a staid earthly existence. No problem, Lovecraft implies—zombie philosophers can do just fine in academia.

Gidney’s Jed fears that Olokun will demand his soul in exchange for removing his disfiguring facial scar. It remains unclear what Olokun does take, for he only names his price as “this thing.” It’s also unclear what Olokun gives Jed. I stumble toward thinking that the god’s price is Jed’s scar, the “proud flesh” in the shape of Guinea, whereas his boon is the soul—the identity—that Jed lost with his beauty. After his return from the deep, Jed is “whole again.” Or is he whole for the first time? Pre-Olokun, Jed is estranged from both communities to which he wants entrance. As an American Black man, he feels like an interloper among non-American Black people—he might as well be white in comparison. It’s not an estrangement new to his vacation on St. Sebastian, for back home he also viewed a neighboring Ethiopian congregation with an outsider’s awe and envy. Disfigured, he feels excluded from the gay society in which (he believes) “male beauty is of paramount importance.”

The two ideals (of whiteness and masculine attractiveness) intertwine in Jed’s mind, suppressing his “soul.” Consider the thoughts—patterns of belief—that Olokun devours and processes to silt, ocean-bottom mulch. They’re represented by images of “blond-haired Adonises, with muscles of alabaster,” “blue eyes,” “aquiline noses and thin lips,” a “brown-haired Jesus.” Freed of these thoughts, Jed can see Olokun’s worshippers neither as exotic superiors nor “stupid savages” but as his people.

Still, it isn’t until Jed realizes his scar is gone that he feels “whole again,” that he can stand up nude without caring. Maybe his conviction that beauty is paramount hasn’t gone wholly to silt? Or maybe it’s critically altered by his sense that “the serpent sun under the sea” is now in his heart? I’m not sure how to intellectually parse the “serpent sun,” but it’s a compelling image.

Jed doesn’t know who Olokun is, going into his adventure. I didn’t know either. It turns out he figures in the Yoruba religion (and other belief systems of Africa and the African diaspora) as the orisha spirit of wealth, health, prosperity and the bottom of the ocean. He may appear as male or female or as an androgynous being—hence his priest’s androgyny? Not surprisingly, Jed sees Olokun as powerfully and gorgeously male, in spite of his mermanish lack of (visible) genitalia.

So Olokun is “real,” but what about the island of St. Sebastian? The only reference I find to a St. Sebastian in the Caribbean is to the fictional island featured in the 1943 film, “I Walked With a Zombie.” That makes sense. The movie island is home to sugar plantations formerly worked by enslaved Africans. Its population is majority Black, with a small white elite still running the plantations. Voudun is one of the religions on Gidney’s St. Sebastian; voodoo looms large in “I Walked,” as one would expect from the title. A key prop in the movie is an arrow-studded statue of St. Sebastian, once the figurehead of a slave ship; a key image in “Sea, Swallow Me” is the grotto-gracing Sebastian who swoons in “an ecstasy of arrows.” Arrows will do that to sculpted people—look at Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa.”

On the topic of saints, and eroticism, St. Sebastian’s traditional backstory doesn’t mention homosexuality—at least not so shallowly as I’ve researched it. Traditional paintings of Sebastian are another matter. Unlike most martyrs, Sebastian got to die for Jesus twice, because he didn’t quite die the first time. That was when the Emperor Diocletian found out his captain of Praetorian Guards was a secret Christian and had him lashed to a post and shot full of arrows. He pulled through that ordeal, only to be bludgeoned to death later on. Bludgeoning to death isn’t nearly as sexy as being shot with arrows, though, so artists usually depicted Sebastian as a very handsome, very sparsely clad youth looking torn between pain and pleasure by his piercings.

I’m hazarding a guess that Gidney has seen the 1976 historical film (with dialogue in Latin!) called Sebastiane. Its homoeroticism is front and center. Sebastiane himself sublimates his sexual longings in worship of Phoebus Apollo (not Jesus), not good news for all the characters in love with him. A crucial plot point is how Sebastiane angers Diocletian by preventing the strangulation of an Imperial catamite—the sole gay club on Gidney’s St. Sebastian is The Catamite.

All in all, it makes sense for Jed to go to St. Sebastian. Among other duties, St. Sebastian is patron saint of the plague-stricken. Just throwing that out there, in this pandemic era. And don’t forget Olokun, who (among other duties) presides over health.

We need all the divine intervention we can get. Unless, of course, it comes from the King in Yellow or pretty much any Lovecraftian deity.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Craig Gidney is local to me, and we often end up reading together in the general round of DC-area-queer-specfic events. I never know what to expect from one of his pieces, except that it’s going to be good and some flavor of horror-ish: It ranges from magical realist ghost stories about folk art (A Spectral Hue, which I blurbed) to blood-and-guts-and-werewolves. “Sea, Swallow Me” leans toward the former, hanging out with the weird fiction crowd under the “strange things happen in the ocean” banner.

It also fills a niche that I urgently want more of, which is stories about people learning to breathe underwater. With all the Deep One tales we’ve covered, we have yet to get a first-person account of metamorphosis. (And yes, I plan to do something about that myself, one of these days.) Seanan McGuire’s Violet forces that gift on others; Sonya Taaffe’s Anson mourns its lack. But Gidney offers a taste of that moment where fear of drowning transmutes to wonder and glory—if not, in this case, forever.

Or… maybe not so temporary. At least, no more temporary than any ordinary life in the air. What Jed’s gifted isn’t dwelling in wonder and glory underwater, but finding that sense of home and welcome on land, in his body, and with his desires. Only a small part of the transformation is physical: the loss of the scar that Olokun argues was a blessing. Fortunately Olokun is a generous orisha, willing to provide what Jed wants in exchange for the discomfort and distance that he needs to lose. It’s a good trade—and a very different take on coming to terms with your nature than we often see in the weird.

Jed starts off uncomfortable with a lot of things about himself and his world. He comes to Saint Sebastian as a tourist, content neither with the safety of the resort nor the vulnerability of less sheltered areas. The island “hates him.” He dislikes his body: thin, ashy, scarred. (And being uncomfortable with his own blackness, as I read it, goes beyond the simply physical—much of Olokun’s “price” seems to be white ideals of beauty.) I also get a subtler sense of discomfort around gender, or maybe around sexuality. Jed describes the priest as both male and genderless, using the awkward pronoun “it.” He refers to birdlike “feminine” creatures from the original Dark Crystal (all, in fact, male, and you can all thank me for not being distracted by a tangent about muppet gender). Then he meets Olokun—who in myth can appear as either male or female—and perceives the orisha as thoroughly and attractively male. And then, coming back from that experience, the island loves him.

I’m considering, as I try to articulate my interpretations, the value and power of reading a story that wasn’t intended for me. I don’t mean that I shouldn’t have read it, or that I found any barrier to enjoying it—but that it’s about the experience of being black and gay, and of claiming full at-homeness with those things that the world pushes people to alienate even in themselves. And it has the richness, the complexity, that comes from being an offering for people who share that experience. The push toward alienation, that struggle to be at home with oneself, are also part of the experience of being female and queer and Jewish, but the experiences aren’t identical. Which means, I’m sure, that there are things I’m missing or mis-describing, even as I appreciate the commonalities.

Which is, I suppose, appropriate to a tale about filling voids and making connections.

Next week we follow a Miskatonic University archeological expedition—what could possibly go wrong—with Maurice Broaddus’s “The Iron Hut.”

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is now available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post An Ecstasy of Arrows: Craig Laurance Gidney’s “Sea, Swallow Me” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we’re reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Flash Frame,” first published in 2010 in Carrie Cuinn’s Cthulhurotica anthology; you can more easily find it in Ross E. Lockhart’s The Book of Cthulhu. Spoilers ahead.

“I looked at my steno pad and the lined, yellow pages reminded me of leprous skin.”

“The sound is yellow.” That’s unnamed narrator’s opening statement, explanation (if explanation is possible) to follow.

Back in 1982, narrator was a freelance journalist in Mexico City. In those pre-wire service days, he eked out a living providing articles for a range of publications, including an arts and culture magazine; however, it’s a “mixed-bag of crime stories, tits and freakish new items” called Enigma! that’s his chief source of income. Unfortunately, Enigma!’s new editor is picky. Narrator needs a story too sensational to reject.

He visits El Tabu, a once-grand Art Deco theater, now showing porno flicks and providing shelter to the homeless and the hustling. Projectionist Sebastian, a reliable source for sordid gossip, mentions a religious group that rents the theater every Thursday. The Order of something, as Sebastian unhelpfully names it, sounds like a sex cult to him. Sounds like because he’s never actually seen their services—they provide their own projectionist and confine him to the lobby. Still, he’s heard enough to doubt they’re worshiping Jesus.

The head of the Order is Enrique Zozoya—apparently a hippie activist in the ‘60s and a New Age guru in the early ‘70s. Since then he’s dropped out of sight. The lead’s intriguing enough for narrator to return to El Tabu the following Thursday armed with notebook and tape recorder. The notebook’s reliable; the old recorder sometimes switches on at random. Narrator hides on the balcony, peeking through a curtain as fifty worshipers enter. Zozoya, dressed in bright yellow, says a few (to narrator) incomprehensible words, then the projection begins.

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It’s a movie about ancient Rome as seen by ‘50s Hollywood, though with lots more bare tits. The actors are mostly “comely and muscled,” but background players have something “twisted and perverted about them.” Featured are an emperor and his female companion. The film lasts only ten minutes. Just before the end, narrator glimpses a flash frame of a woman in a yellow dress. Zozoya makes another inaudible speech, then everyone leaves.

Narrator’s underwhelmed, but returns the next week. This time Zozoya has a hundred congregants. Same film, new scene, this time a chariot race. But the dialogue’s missing—someone’s replaced the original soundtrack with new music and an undercurrent of moans and sighs. Near the end comes another flash frame of the yellow-clad woman sitting on a throne, blond hair laced with jewels, face hidden by a fan.

How is Zozoya collecting a congregation for some ‘70s exploitation flick shown only in snippets? Narrator goes to the Cineteca Nacional to research the film. He digs up nothing, but an employee promises to look into the mystery. The matter troubles him enough to dream about a naked woman crawling into his bed, wearing a golden headpiece with a veil. Her skin is jaundiced, its texture unpleasant. When narrator displaces the veil, he sees only a yellow blur.

Next day he feels unwell. His yellow notepad reminds him of the woman’s skin, and he gets little writing done. But Thursday he’s back at El Tabu, for his journalistic sixth sense suggests he’s chasing a worthy story. The new snippet’s set at a banquet, with emperor and companion overlooking naked but masked guests, some scarred or filthy. The guests copulate. Flash frame: the woman in yellow, fan before face, yellow curtains billowing behind her to reveal a long pillared hallway. She crooks a finger, beckoning. Back to the banquet, where the emperor’s companion has collapsed. The end. Narrator strains to hear Zozoya’s closing speech. It sounds like chanting, which the congregation echoes, all two hundred of them.

Narrator dreams again of the woman in the veil. She kneels over him, displaying a vulva of sickly yellow. Her hands press his chest, weirdly oily. He wakes and rushes to vomit. Next morning he can’t tolerate the yellow of his eggs, or of the manila folder containing his El Tabu research. He tosses both. After another nightmare, he’s weak and shivering. In the streets yellow cabs and yellow sunflowers so appall that he rushes home. A fourth nightmare, in which the woman gnaws his chest, wakes him screaming. He knocks over his tape recorder. It starts playing the movie’s soundtrack, which the machine must have recorded last time. He’s about to switch it off when he hears something that shocks him.

At El Tabu, the congregation’s swelled to three hundred. The snippet’s of a funeral procession for the emperor’s companion. Torches show men and women copulating in the background, not all of them with “anything human.” The emperor rides a litter with the yellow woman, who lifts her veil. It’s the shade of bright flames. The emperor—and narrator—look away.

Next day the Cineteca employee calls. She’s discovered the film is called Nero’s Last Days. They have a copy in their vault.

In March 1982, narrator notes, the Cineteca archives burn for sixteen hours before firemen extinguish the blaze. El Tabu burns down also. The reason is what he heard on his recording, what the machine caught that his ears couldn’t. The real voice track of the movie was—yellow. Noxious, festering, diseased, hungry yellow. Speaking to the audience, telling things, demanding things, “the yellow maw, the voracious voice that should never have spoken at all.”

Warning signs are yellow, and narrator heeded the warning.

Now narrator’s an editor for that arts magazine. He’s covering a Cineteca Nacional retrospective that will include—a rare print from the collection of Zozoya’s widow, of guess what film.

Since 1982 the Cineteca’s gotten higher tech vaults, but narrator’s learned more about chemistry. This time it’ll take the firemen more than sixteen hours to extinguish the fire.

What’s Cyclopean: Yellow yellow yellow yellow golden jaundiced yellow leprous bright noxious yellow festering yellow insatiable yellow

The Degenerate Dutch: Everyone here is degenerate; most of the story takes place in a porn theater.

Mythos Making: For all its serious artistic flaws, we find The King in Yellow translated into opera, paintings, and now film. Truly a multimedia franchise.

Libronomicon: Read Enigma! for true crime, tits, and “freakish news items.” And, we guess, arson.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Once you start tossing out perfectly good eggs, something is definitely wrong.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Ah, The King in Yellow. Never a bestseller, but perennially in print. Read and discussed around the world, translated into every language. (Every language.) Adapted for stage and screen—and thoroughly recognizable, even when the title is changed. A dangerous king is a dangerous king, right? Or queen.

Our last encounter with That Play was Fiona Maeve Geist’s adaptation to rock opera. But in every incarnation, it has much the same effect as Cthulhu shifting in his sleep: madness, art, and the overturning of the status quo. But because Lovecraft and Chambers had very different ideas about dangerous revolution, Cthulhian uprisings may be somewhat sympathetic to the non-imperialist reader, while Kingly uprisings are distinctly authoritarian. “The Repairer of Reputations” gives us the original of this pattern, borne out in Robin Laws’ expansions. Alexis Hall’s The Affair of the Mysterious Letter (too long for this column, but awesome) portrays a post-revolutionary Carcosa more hazardous than the Reign of Terror.

And Silvia Moreno Garcia gives us… something ambiguous. A yellow journalist watching a dangerous play from hiding in the back of a porn theater. A 2-bit demagogue who’s gotten hold of something real, attracting followers to watch clips of the sort of coupling that would give Lovecraft nightmares, and give the world… what? We never see what the followers do outside the theater, in response to the insatiable demands of the film’s voice track. We never hear what their leader tells them. And we don’t, in fact, know if what the tape recorder picked up is the same thing they heard. Are they all having dreams of squelchy yellow queens coming on to them, or is that just narrator?

And if they are having those dreams… what happens if you actually let her have her way? What actually scared Lovecraft wasn’t so much the coupling as the result of the coupling—what happens, say, 9 months later? Parasitic breeders, man. Can’t live with them…

The only clear result of the movie that we see, in fact, is the narrator’s growing taste for arson. Sure, each case he describes is intended to destroy a specific print of the film. But (1) I trust that about as much as I trust any claim made by someone who’s encountered That Play, and (2) there’s an awful lot of collateral damage, and by the end he seems to revel in it. Can shouting and killing be far behind?

Because that’s the thing about That Play. Once it’s shaped you, even your attempts to rebel against it are tainted. Are maybe even playing into what it wants. In “Repairer,” both sides of the incipient conflict ultimately serve the King. In “The Yellow Sign,” we can’t be sure of exactly what happens, other than that it’s painful and unpleasant for everyone involved. And that it serves the King.

For my money, That Play is far more terrifying than Cthulhu. Because you could have chosen to do one seemingly trivial thing differently—take a different book off the shelf, go after a different sordid story—and you’d have been fine. It’s the ease of making a little mistake, and paying everything for it, that we can only wish was limited to fictional theater. It’s the system that’s so big you can’t imagine changing it, ready to crush you into an extra grain for its insatiable maw. It’s the uncaring universe made paper or melody or celluloid, and compressed into portable form for your personal edification.

And everything you believe afterwards, everything you do to resist and serve it, will make complete sense.

Anne’s Commentary

Welcome back to the world’s scariest color. Have we seen the Yellow Sign? We have, many times. How about the King in Yellow? He’s an old friend, along with Howard’s High Priest Not to Be Described, who lurks deep in an ill-famed monastery on the Plateau of Leng, a yellow silk mask over his, or its, face. We’ve even made the acquaintance of a canine Yellow King in “Old Tsah- Hov.” Surely we’re overdue for a Yellow Queen?

We need wait no longer, for this week Silvia Moreno-Garcia serves Her up in the modern medium of celluloid. Twentieth-century cultists didn’t have time to scour musty antiquarian bookshops for an obscure play printed on paper as jaundiced as its titular monarch. It was much simpler for them to repair to a musty porn theater. Forget about reading a whole first act to get to the juicy second one. It was much less trying to the attention span to take their insalubrious entertainment in movie form. Zozoya didn’t even demand his followers sit still for a couple hours—instead, a forward-looking hierophant, he dished up vlog-length portions of ten minutes or so. And, like a savvy YouTuber, he saw his followers increase each week. Think what he could have done today, with a real YouTube channel, new videos uploaded every Thursday, don’t forget to like and subscribe and comment below on your rad nightmares!

Upon more sober consideration, maybe we don’t want to think about that. Social media would have given Zozoya a platform sufficient to start a world-consuming saffron conflagration. The pyrotechnics of “Flash Frame’s” narrator would have been pathetic sparks in comparison.

The King in Yellow is a frank demon, for He only appears to wear a mask—that’s His real face, Cassilda! Like Lovecraft’s High Priest, Moreno-Garcia’s Queen wears a yellow veil. This concealment, I think, makes them even more terrifying. What do they have to hide, how soul-wrenchingly hideous must they be? The Queen may actually up her scare-factor by being so unconcerned about revealing the rest of Her body, to its most intimate parts; and they’re scary enough, being coarse-textured, oily—and yellow. A yellow so diseased it infects with dread all the wholesome or cheerful yellows of narrator’s world, from egg yolks to taxicabs to sunflowers. More tellingly, it contaminates the yellows of his trade, steno pad pages, manila folders.

This Queen, this Yellow, is contagion itself. She and It are not content with poisoning sight; they also inflict the synaesthetic punishment of generating yellow sound, a maddening super-aural sensation that can only be consciously perceived via recorder playback. A machine has no emotional filters, no self-defensive deaf spots. Zozoya deliberately uses technology to serve his Queen; accidentally, technology reveals and thwarts Her.

Temporarily, locally, thwarts Her, I guess. Aren’t temporary, local victories the best we can hope for when faced with hungry cosmic horrors and contagions from beyond? Colors out of space, “yellow” as well as “fuschia” to our poor primate brains. “Queens” as well as “Kings” to our primate notions of hierarchy and sex. We have only metaphors for their realities.

Like other writers we’ve seen tackle yellow as the scariest color, Moreno-Garcia employs all the descriptors of disease: Her yellows are jaundiced and leprous and sickly and festering and withered and noxious. Reminiscent of pustules bursting open. Warning signs. Yellow cabs look like lithe scarabs—the sacred scarab of Egypt was a dung beetle, and aren’t both insects and dung associated with contagion? So is unprotected sex, like that practised in the orgies of Nero’s Last Days (where some participants are scarred or filthy or outright inhuman) and that implied by the Queen’s dream-assaults on narrator.

Contagion of the viral type is much on our minds these days, both in the biological and media senses. Is this what made “Flash Frame” particularly unsettling for me? I think so. From behind my masks, actual and metaphorical, I do think so.

Next week, Craig Lawrence Gidney’s “Sea, Swallow Me” raises questions of oceanic origins. You can find it in the author’s collection of the same title.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is now available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post Journalism More Yellow Than Most: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Flash Frame” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we’re reading Stephen Graham Jones’s “The Spindly Man,” first published in Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries anthology in 2014 and available in the September 2016 issue of The Dark. Spoilers ahead. (Also spoilers for Stephen King’s 1994 story “The Man in the Black Suit,” which you can find in The Weird.)

“Proof,” he said. “We’ve all got proof, man. I bet every one of us has a story like this kid’s. Don’t we?”

Prof—we may as well use the spindly man’s sobriquet for our unnamed narrator—taught at the state university before he ran a red light with his son Jeremy. The wreck left the nine-year-old permanently disfigured. Too many surgeries and bills later, Prof “flamed out” of his university contract and returned to a night-shift gig stocking tools and ACs.

His one real gift remains talking about books; he leads a Wednesday night reading group at the community center. It’s a form of community service required by no judge but himself.

The group includes bank employee Marcy, retired Air Force officer Lew, city planner Drake, constant crotcheter Evelyn, and Jackie and her junior-high daughter Gwen. This week Lew brings chicken dumplings, and the reading is Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit. It’s about a nine-year-old boy who meets the black-suited Devil while fishing in the woods; Prof figures that because the tale’s related eighty years later, putting the encounter safely in the past, it’s not as terrifying as other King stories.

The discussion begins with whether the boy, asleep just before the Devil appeared, might have dreamed the meeting. Or maybe he met a bad man and, being a Bible-schooled Methodist, imaginatively imposed fiery eyes and shark-teeth on a merely human malefactor. Then Prof suggests that if the boy really did meet a devil, he’d have to believe in angels as well. Yes?

Before anyone answers, the gym doors swing open to admit a stranger. He’s tall and spindly, wearing a top hat and ragged-edged black suit. For a breath-stuck moment, Prof thinks the stranger’s eyes flash fire, but it’s just light reflecting off his pince-nez. The stranger drags a chair into their circle and asks if there’s room for one more.

Spindly-Man seems to know the members too well, saluting Lew and calling Marcy a “money-handler.” He also gazes a bit too long at teen-age Gwen. But Prof doesn’t know how to exclude him, so discussion continues. Spindly-Man remarks “Go into the forest, taste the intangible. You come back with the story, never the proof.” Prof counters that if you prove a religion’s tenets, you remove the possibility of faith. When the Devil showed himself he cored out the boy’s faith, leaving him hollow.

Spindly-Man grins and says we all have proof of the Devil–everyone here could tell a story like King’s.

Sure enough, the group members volunteer their supernatural experiences. Marcy and a friend once snuck out at night, only to be chased by something that crawled spider-like down a windmill. Evelyn drove home one night perilously low on gas, followed the whole way by headlights that then vanished–a guardian angel? Drake dared a childhood fear of something lurking outside his window, only to see eyes looking back through the glass. (His own, of course—he was just a stupid kid.) For Lew, it was in Nam, when a dead sniper kept firing, supported like a puppet by–another man he doesn’t describe. Jackie and Gwen heard noises in the garage after Gwen’s father died–a puppy, which Jackie’s sure her husband miraculously left to comfort them.

Spindly-Man eats up their stories with unnerving relish. And what about Prof, he demands.

The discussion’s gone off track, yet Prof admits the members’ anecdotes show how King taps into “an archetypal well of shared stories.” He relates his own tale. The day of the accident, the driver of the truck they hit, he wasn’t human. Prof thinks he was waiting at that intersection just to cross in front of Prof’s car, smiling all the while.

Spindly-Man suggests that Prof didn’t see a “man-in-a-black-suit” in the truck cab. He only tells himself that, to escape his guilt.

This brings the group to a premature end. Everyone leaves with customary goodbyes, pretending all’s normal. All but Spindly-Man. One night around the campfire, he may tell how some book-club members thought horror stories were made-up, how they didn’t know what they were getting into. Oh, is he uninvited now?

Will that stop him? Prof asks.

Spindly-Man leaves suggesting maybe tonight’s story isn’t done yet. Prof mentally prepares to go to his night job, with its “walls and walls of shadows.” At the gym doors, he sees the reflection of two points of flame behind him, Devil-eyes. Spindly-Man’s snuck up behind!

The flame-eyes disappear. Were never there. But when they appear again, Prof realizes they’re his own eyes. He’s the Devil, the one smiling behind the wheel. He imagines himself into King’s story, hunched grinning in the forest brush, licking tears from his cheeks with his split tongue. Run, he tells the nine-year-old. If the boy stays, something bad will happen.

But something bad happens anyway.

What’s Cyclopean: The story rhythms and speaking patterns are King-like—“Just doing it for meanness, like.”—raising the question of whether we’re in Castle Rock.

The Degenerate Dutch: Narrator describes the book group as “a good mix of backgrounds and ages, anyway, if not very diverse,” suggesting awareness of a larger world of experiences not represented there.

Mythos Making: It’s Stephen King’s mythos at play this week—though not necessarily King’s cosmology.

Libronomicon: The book club covers King’s “The Man in the Black Suit,” and it’s implied that they’ve covered other works of his previously.

Madness Takes Its Toll: “Everyone’s got a story like that,” but most are more ambiguity than any sort of proof—plausible coincidence or simply encountered under the influence of fatigue or battle fog or childhood terror. It’s only by correlating their contents that we construct meaning.

Anne’s Commentary

Like John Langan’s “Technicolor,” Jones’s “Spindly Man” is a story about a story and the effects it has on its readers. The narrators of both are college instructors, or were. Whereas Langan’s professor has nefarious motives for assigning “The Masque of the Red Death,” Jones’s “Prof” chooses “The Man in the Black Suit” with no ill intentions, except (semi-consciously) towards himself. How can King’s nine-year-old Gary not remind him of his own Jeremy? Does he mean to harrow himself, or does he hope to strengthen his desperate self-exoneration? The Devil inflicted lifelong psychic damage on Gary, no really, THE Devil, supernatural evil incarnate. So, too, did a truck-driving, grinning Devil inflict lifelong physical damage on Jeremy. Even though Prof was technically at fault for running that stop sign, he wasn’t vicious (drunk) or irresponsible (speeding). He was momentarily off-guard, so the Devil lurking at the intersection could take advantage of his innocent mistake, or even cause him to make it.

The Devil made him do it. Truly. Only who was the Devil in this case? Spindly-Man claims a devil resides in every angel, waiting to claw its way out. If even angels have such dual natures, it follows that humans must too.

What human wants to believe this?

Or worse, to know this?

Prof wants to believe his gnawing guilt unwarranted. He wants King’s fiction of Gary meeting the Devil in the woods to be the reality of Jeremy meeting the Devil at an intersection–the crossroads, yes, where folklore has it He can be summoned! Belief, in the sense of faith, is the ultimate mental shield, because faith allows you to believe what you want to believe without proof. Indeed, proof is inimical to faith. Proof begets knowledge; and knowledge, well, acknowledges churlish reality, which refuses to bend to one’s desires. That refusal would be tolerable only if reality were always as comfortable as one’s treasured faiths, say, that God cares about His/Her/Its creations, us in particular.

Instead reality is too often a bitch. Reality means that a bee sting can be fatal to the venom-sensitive, whatever the stung one’s mother so vehemently wants to believe that she’ll make it her new religion. Reality means the Devil can sit down beside you and propose to eat you all up, and do it too if you’re not clever or lucky enough. Reality means that one afternoon you might think to hell with stop signs and roll on through, your son paying the price for your impulse.

Stephen King has always understood reality. By writing about it in fantastical terms, he’s dipped for decades into that “archetypal well of shared stories.” King tells us bad things want to hurt us. Sometimes the bad things succeed. Sometimes cleverness pulls us through, or human fellowship, or often the two combined. Still, bad things can win, and tend to come back.

Jones’s Prof has gathered a human fellowship around him; together they make sense out of stories. With “Man in the Black Suit” they misstep, inviting in a Devil who imposes this wicked sense on their personal tales: The supernatural, diabolic or angelic, is real, and you know it, but you know it alone because you can’t prove it. Ouch. The diabolic’s especially cruel to Prof, since it points out that no external Devil injured his son–it was his internal demon, the more terrible because it at once maims and weeps.

The question of which is preferable, belief or knowledge, reality or fantastical faith, is one Lovecraft famously addresses in “Call of Cthulhu”:

“….The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

As Lovecraft reveres science and despises religion, he can’t envision a true haven from an indifferent cosmos. Yet it’s not indifferent enough! Mindless Azathoth is a bee that stings because that’s what bees do, no malice. Its Soul Nyarlathotep, on the other hand, is a bee that singles out allergic humans with mocking glee. It’s a Man-in-a-Black-Suit–literally in some manifestations.

Knowing and deliberate, too, are King’s and Jones’s Devils. They’re forearmed with deadly intelligence on their targets. They’re not to be thwarted. Though Gary physically escapes, Black-Suit haunts him to the grave, maybe beyond. Prof can’t stop the Devil from taking over his group and thwarting his attempt to transfer blame. The difference is that knowledge of the Devil doesn’t absolutely destroy Gary’s long life. Prof, however, must not only acknowledge the Devil but that Prof himself partakes of Devilry, and this knowledge could wreck him.

We know not to speak of the Devil, lest he come. Maybe we shouldn’t read about the Devil, either, or at least not blithely discuss Him over chicken dumplings and crocheted scarves. I think the dumplings in particular were a sore temptation for the Old Goat–for whom wouldn’t they be?

No, I take it back. We have to speak–and read–of the Devil. Otherwise, how will we recognize Him, on the hoof or in ourselves?

Ruthanna’s Commentary

This week’s selection seems to illustrate nicely (in the “nice and accurate” sense) the distinguishability of cosmic horror and weird fiction. It’s not in the least bit cosmic: the horror is thoroughly personal. But it is weird, decentering human belief even as it puts human experience—not at the center of the universe, only at the center of the story. (An important difference even if stories might be real.) It starts with the assumption that devils imply angels—a whole cosmos laid out neatly for human comfort—and ends with the question of whether, if you see a devil in the mirror and realize it’s your reflection, it means only that you’re being stupid.

“The Man in the Black Suit” isn’t a King I’ve previously read, though it’s well-known and award-winning—it is, in fact, his representation in The Weird. I find it one of his best, minimalist and observed with exactitude. It’s also extremely Christian—to give you a taste of the symbolism, the boy keeps the devil from eating him by sacrificing the biggest fish he’s ever caught. While there’s a touch of doubt at the end, it’s a story of certainty where Jones provides a story of difficult interpretations and doubt.

The contrasts between the two stories are sharp and deliberate. King’s child is innocent, his devil city-slick, and both are held back by boundaries—the child by parental instruction not to stray past the river fork, the devil by fish and the border between woods and human habitation. Jones’s (possible) devil is raggedy and ignores restrictions of place and social contract alike. Jones’s adult seeks absolution from sin or at least from horrific failure, and is a boundary-breaker. His child is in the hospital because he ran a stop sign; his lost teaching position pushes him across class lines; his ambiguous revelation comes after crossing a literal line of paint at a gym.

Much of horror is about what happens if you break rules and cross boundaries. In some stories, those consequences reinforce the rules’ reality, reflecting a deeper underlying order. One definition of the weird, though, is stories where the consequence of boundary-crossing is understanding that the boundary was meaningless all along. Underlying order is merely an illusion born of narrow vision. You can’t un-know the truth, even if you wish you could. By these definitions, King’s story isn’t weird, but Jones’s crosses that line easily.

Book clubs are a form of boundary-setting, Prof’s maybe more than most. He calls it a good thing he’s doing, and maybe it is—he seems to be building community and relationships among the attendees. But he also uses the club to keep control of something in his life, the flow of the conversation and the meaning of the stories. Note his plan—he’s not going to ask the “students” if they think the story’s devil is real, or actually implies angels and heaven, only whether faith’s better than knowledge. A comfortable topic to fill a couple of hours, not the sort of challenge that the spindly man brings. No personal revelations and no actual truth-seeking required.

And some of his interpretive assumptions are interesting. Why say the old man’s life is hollow because it isn’t summarized in a short story about his childhood? Is it really Prof’s life that’s hollow? For that matter, does choosing not to share details (as all the book club members choose before Spindly Man breaks the rules) mean those details aren’t important? It makes me wonder about narrator’s own lacunae—for example, his failure to mention his wife’s name or her reaction to car accident and job loss, his failure to describe anything personal about Jeremy.

Then there’s that ending—narrator’s own ambiguous revelation. Is it simply that he’s the “devil,” the one responsible for the accident, the one who smiled inappropriately in his post-accident shock? Or is something stranger going on here? I’m half-convinced that our narrator is in fact the devilish furniture truck driver, sketching out the lives he’s blighted and acting a part based on those sparsely-understood details. The book group who “didn’t know what they were playing with”—is that overlooked danger the spindly man? Or narrator himself?

Or both? How many devils can there be in the world—and what does it mean, if the devils don’t imply anything beyond their own actions?

Next week, we switch from professors to journalists desperate for a good—or at least spicy—story, in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Flash Frame.” You can find it in The Book of Cthulhu.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is now available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

The post Potluck Devils: Stephen Graham Jones’s “The Spindly Man” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, we’re reading Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” first published in the June 1984 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Spoilers ahead—but seriously, if you’ve never read this, go read it first. You can find it in The Weird and probably in five other anthologies already on your shelves, or on audio here.

“At this stage, it would eat any flesh except its mother’s.”

Summary

Gan’s last night of childhood begins in the Preserve, a Terran enclave set aside by the Tlic government. T’Gatoi is in charge of the Preserve; Gan’s mother Lien says it’s an honor for their families to be linked. His mother and T’Gatoi befriended each other long ago. Having to give one of her children to a Tlic, naturally Lien chose T’Gatoi, and within three minutes of Gan’s birth, T’Gatoi caged him within her many limbs. She’s been part of his life ever since.

T’Gatoi takes care of Gan, and Gan must take care of T’Gatoi. Her political faction has put an end to the days when Terrans were bred like animals for Tlic convenience. T’Gatoi has established the practice of joining Tlic and human families, parceling humans out to the desperate or selling them to the rich, making the Terrans “necessities, status symbols, and an independent people” rather than beasts of… bearing.

This evening, T’Gatoi’s brought two sterile eggs from her sister. Lien shares one with Gan’s siblings. The other’s for Gan alone. Lien must be urged to sip from the egg, although its dreamy intoxication heals and prolongs life. Having submitted, she supplants Gan in T’Gatoi’s velvet-bellied embrace. T’Gatoi stings her toward sleep; fading, Lien whispers, “Do you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?”

“Not for anything,” T’Gatoi reassures Lien.

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Commotion outside interrupts the family party. T’Gatoi whips off her couch, three meters of segmented body. She returns carrying an unconscious young man, Bran Lomas according to his armband and N’Tlic according to T’Gatoi. Gan shrinks from the diagnosis. Older brother Qui’s sent summon the man’s Tlic, T’Khotgif. Qui, who resents the Tlic, won’t be of any other use. Lien and Gan’s sisters retreat to their rooms.

Lomas regains consciousness as T’Gatoi sends Gan out to kill one of his family’s stock animals. He takes the forbidden rifle hidden by his late father and shoots a native achti. He drags it to T’Gatoi, who’s telling Lomas she’ll sting him to sleep once it’s over. After that T’Khotgif will come with healing eggs.

“T’Khotgif!” is the last coherent word Lomas shouts. Gan pins his arms while T’Gatoi’s dextrous claws first bisect the dead achti, then open Lomas’s abdomen. Gan fights nausea but watches as she extracts worms fifteen centimeters long, blind, blood-slimy. They’ve been poisoning Lomas to weaken him before they devour their way out of his body—instead T’Gatoi transfers them into the achti, a substitute host. She’s pleased to find so many grubs, one a vigorous male. “Everything lives inside you Terrans,” she says.

All his life he’s been told this is “a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together.. .a kind of birth.” He’s seen pictures. The reality is so much worse. He wouldn’t have thought anything about T’Gatoi could seem alien to him.

Seeing his distress, T’Gatoi sends him outside. He vomits. A car arrives with a Terran doctor, Qui, and T’Khotgif. T’Khotgif asks after Lomas with concern before going inside. Gan walks off. Qui pursues him. Has Gan learned more than he wants to know? And don’t give him one of T’Gatoi’s looks—Gan’s not her, he’s her property.

Qui confesses he once secretly watched a Tlic and N’Tlic man stranded far from help. Without an animal to which she could transfer her young, the Tlic killed the man and let the emerging grubs eat him. But of course Qui knows that T’Gatoi likes Gan; she’ll be careful with him. Oh, and by the way, has she done it to Gan yet? He’s the right age for implantation—

Gan hits his brother until Qui knocks him down in self-defense. Recovering, he goes home and reloads his father’s rifle. T’Gatoi joins him in the darkened kitchen. She’s sorry Gan had to see Lomas suffer—no one will ask Lomas to do that again.

No one ever asks us, Gan counters. You never asked me.

Coiled on the table, T’Gatoi asks if Gan means to shoot her. Instead he tucks the barrel under his own chin. He doesn’t want to be a host animal, not even hers.

After a long pause, T’Gatoi says that the Tlic don’t see humans as host animals. When the Tlic were declining, their ancestral hosts having evolved to resist the grubs, his people brought them back to health. Gan’s ancestors fled oppression on their homeworld, and survived here because of the Tlic. Would Gan rather die than bear her young? Should she go to his sister, who’ll welcome the connection?

Gan isn’t Qui, willing to sacrifice a sibling. He lowers the rifle but insists on keeping it. She must accept the risk if she really sees him as partner rather than animal.

T’Gatoi concedes. In Gan’s room, she implants him with her first egg. The procedure is painless, even soothing. Gan admits he isn’t submitting only to save his sister. He wants to keep T’Gatoi for himself. And silently he pledges he’ll take care of her, his Tlic.

Aloud, T’Gatoi pledges the same: She’ll take care of him.

What’s Cyclopean: Simple language, direct and unflinching, makes for extremely effective description of parasitic alien breeding practices.

The Degenerate Dutch: The human community among the Tlic is fleeing enslavement or genocide on Earth. On the Tlic world, they’re confined to a reservation with limited civil rights, with one child per family getting “parceled out” to high-ranked Tlic.

Mythos Making: The Tlic echo the common horror trope of something alien using human bodies to breed. Butler handles it a little differently than most.

Libronomicon: No books this week.

Madness Takes Its Toll: No madness this week, just a lot of complex reactions to trauma.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I’ve read “Bloodchild” several times, but it’s been a few years. About halfway through, I recalled that the delay is because I last read it while my wife was in the middle of a difficult surrogate pregnancy, whereupon I promptly added it to a running list of excellent stories that should absolutely not be read under those circumstances. In general, though, my experience is that people potentially capable of gestating often read this story very differently from those who’ve never had to worry about the implications of their own personal uterus. I’ve seen reviews that consider the Tlic-human relationship one of wildly imaginative body horror. A commenter asked a couple of weeks ago whether the Reread really earns our claim to girl cooties, so allow me to say: Gee, imagine if one group of people had power over another group, but also depended on that group to carry their children in blood and pain and at risk of their lives. Imagine if that made questions of consent and love and respect between members of those groups hideously fraught and complex. Wouldn’t that be so weird, and isn’t it lucky that nothing like that happens on Earth.

I’ve been eyeing this story in the Weird table of contents for some time, though, and thinking about how, in addition to being in the Bujoldian “biology and manners” subgenre, it really is (brilliant and deeply subversive) weird fiction. On the simplest level, it takes something familiar, turns it into something alien and frightening, gives us a narrator who sees it as something familiar, and gives him an experience that makes it seem alien and frightening. And then—makes him decide what to do about that newfound fear and alienation. Intentionally or not, Butler highlights the choices behind reactions Lovecraft takes for granted. I don’t know that she was deliberately targeting his un-self-conscious fearfulness—but she was certainly targeting and interrogates the bigotry that assumes one right way to handle fear of the other. One right way to handle the idea that your species, your race, your culture, is not only not the center of existence but doesn’t deserve to be the center of existence.

I’ve discussed Lovecraft’s bigotry often, and pointed out that even his contemporaries thought him extreme. And yet, and yet… let’s also not use Lovecraft to excuse either his contemporaries or ours. From well before Lovecraft’s time through to right now, this week, this month, we have ample evidence that fear is treated very differently depending on your race and privilege. Those with more privilege use fear as an excuse for just about anything up to murder; those with less are enjoined to do nothing about legitimate fear for their lives. Bigots want a world where neither of those things is questioned—where neither is treated as a choice.

Horror often goes along with this idea. It shows us people who instinctively flee the terror whose sight cannot be borne, monsters that are so just not right that you can’t be held responsible for meeting them with violence.

The best moment at last year’s Necronomicon was Craig Laurance Gidney, Victor LaValle, and the rest of the Weird Fiction From the African Diaspora panel discussing the fact that you can’t be shocked that the universe is indifferent to your survival if you already know. And that weird fiction by people of color therefore often starts where most Lovecraft stories conclude. Okay, the universe won’t protect you, there are malevolent entities lurking down every dark drive, no shit. Now what?

Thus with Butler here: We have two groups, both historically traumatized and one with much more political power, wrestling with whether that imbalance leaves any room for respectful, loving relationships. The Tlic outlaw technologies that allow humans to fight back (guns, cars), and sometimes choose the lives of their unborn grubs over human survival, but also seem to be struggling towards the question of how to be an ethical parasite. Humans both gain and lose by their relationships with Tlic—but seem to be struggling towards how to assert equality given their differences and mutual needs. Or at least, Gan and T’Gatoi are struggling for those things.

The Vandermeers’ introduction to “Bloodchild” mentions that Butler was inspired by her fear of botflies. To start from there, and get to a story this nuanced—this romantic and frightening and uncomfortable and thought-provoking—provides a powerful glimpse of what we gain when we don’t privilege fear.

Anne’s Commentary

As the introduction to this story in The Weird notes, and as I remember reading elsewhere, Octavia Butler wrote “Bloodchild” as a way to confront her fear of botflies. What’s to fear from botflies? Only that they’ll lay eggs on your skin, which will hatch into larvae that burrow into your flesh and there develop into adult flies, all the time munching away. Worse, they’re sneaky enough to lay eggs on intermediate vectors, like mosquitoes, which will then transport the larvae to your deliciously warm mammalian self.

Okay, that’s disconcerting, as are all parasitic fauna not micro enough for us to go in blissful ignorance. Is it too much to ask of other life forms that they not eat us or feed us to their kids or use us as incubators? Not that we should feel any obligation to return the favor. After all, we are the supreme species, the apex of creation!

The trouble is, botflies act like they’re the apex of creation. In fairness, what choice do they have? They lack the intelligence and empathy that humans can exhibit when they realize that, huh, maybe we aren’t the gilded pinnacle of universal evolution, or at least, there could be other gilded pinnacles on the vasty cathedral of life.

If the pinnacles do nothing but topple each other, the substructure of the cathedral must take damage and weaken, until the whole vasty mess collapses. That metaphor or this: The substructure will hold up fine, all the sturdier for not having to support the damn pinnacles. Either way, the pinnacles will have crumbled.

On Butler’s planet, the indigenous Tlic and refugee Terrans are sapients of apparently equivalent intelligence and technology. The Tlic must have homeworld advantage, but a species-wide reproductive crisis has weakened them: Their native host animals have developed strong resistance to Tlic larvae. The newly arrived Terrans, however, make fantastic hosts, being sizable endotherms with no immunity.

How the Tlic discovered Terrans were prime incubators is a tantalizing bit of backstory Butler leaves to our imaginations. My own imagination conjures desperate Tlic fertiles just giving some juicy-looking alien bipeds a try. Successful experiments would have led to the “domestication” of human stock, which we know happened. We also know some Terrans didn’t “domesticate” without a fight, as tasty and pacifying as those sterile eggs might be. There were shootings, Tlic and N’Tlic blood shed. Rebellion probably simmered a long time before T’Gatoi’s party came up with the Preserve solution and institutionalized the Tlic-Terran relationship from a “parasitic” to a “symbiotic” one.

For the “parasitic” relationship, you might read a “master/slave” or “owner/captive animal” one. For the “symbiotic” relationship, you might read a “partner/partner” one. At some point, the Tlic government and Terran community came to an agreement that the Terrans would have their own “independent” territory, the Preserve, in return for which each Terran family would join with a Tlic family and provide one child to pair with its fertile female.

Is that arrangement a form of marriage or of tribute-payment? That’s the uneasy question at the heart of “Bloodchild.” Maybe symbiosis is natural to the Tlic. That sterile eggs give their consumers both extended life and pleasure suggests the Tlic may use them both among themselves and as their beneficial “contribution” to host animals—later the Terran host partners. If that’s what Terrans really are to them.

Qui doubts it. Gan, shocked by the Lomas incident, begins to. What about Lien? Gan senses a lie in her insistence that it’s an honor to be associated with T’Gatoi. Having already given Gan to T’Gatoi and realizing the Tlic’s marriage to Gan will be “consummated” that night, why does Lien say she wouldn’t sell her son for anything, like, oh, eggs or long life? T’Gatoi agrees that Lien wouldn’t sell him, for any thing. But would Lien give him for a Thing, for love of her old friend, even if it’s a love she must partly regret?

Like mother, like son, then. Gan gives himself to T’Gatoi for love, which is one way to interpret his unwillingness to lose her, great as he now knows the price can be. If T’Gatoi’s concession over the rifle is her sincere acknowledgement that she and Gan are partners, fellow risk-takers, Gan can hope the price isn’t too high.

“Bloodchild” is worthy of all the acclaim it’s won, creating in the still-confined space of a novelette a vivid, self-contained and imaginatively self-perpetuating world. It raises so many questions, furls out so many paths to follow. What was it that drove the Terrans from Earth—who was persecuting this particular group and why? What does it mean to Tlic, to Terran, that Gan’s father “birthed” T’Gatoi? Does that make them siblings of a sort? What’s life like for the sterile sisters in a family? Can the Preserve be preserved, against the pressure of all those desperate and impatient Tlic T’Gatoi must placate? What would Howard have thought of this particular human-alien interaction? Kind of understandable, like the Yith body-hopping thing?

Questions on and on. Isn’t it great?

Next week, Stephen Graham Jones’s “The Spindly Man” invites you to join a book club… with an intense discussion of Stephen King.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is now available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

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